Monday morning and already it's the end of the world. Instead of teaming up with Barnes and Noble to cast out the "ruthless money-making devil" Amazon, a tired-looking James Daunt has pulled up a chair and supped with him, striking a deal to "launch new e-reading services and offer Kindle digital devices through its UK shops". Is that what he meant when he talked about being "different from Amazon … [and] better"?
Daunt said it was a "truly exciting prospect" to welcome a ravening tiger into his living room. Er no. Sorry, what he's really excited about is harnessing "the respective strengths of Waterstones and Amazon to provide a dramatically better digital reading experience for our customers." Meanwhile Jeff Bezos said that Waterstones was his favourite bookseller, and that he was looking forward to getting his teeth into the only remaining rival on the high street – I mean bringing together "digital reading and the physical bookstore".
Writers and agents reacted with incredulity to a deal which seems to do little more for Waterstones than legitimise Amazon's controversial price-check app. Maybe Daunt's called this right, and there's no point in competing with the "best digital readers", but it's hard to see how physical bookshops can make the Kindle "dramatically better".
The thinking seems to be that since we all like browsing in bookshops, and we all like reading on digital devices, combining the "singular pleasures of browsing a curated bookshop" with the "best digital readers" will make for the best of both worlds. But that seems to fundamentally misunderstand the appeal of the digital reading experience. Full disclosure: I don't use a Kindle, but price aside, the attraction of the Kindle experience seems to be that you can have lots of books, straight away – neither of which is usually much of a problem when you're standing in a bookshop. And the risk that Waterstones runs is that by welcoming its greatest rival onto the high street it puts Amazon's device into the hands of its most committed customers.
The terms of the deal won't be announced until the autumn, but the success or failure of this deal will be determined by what people think digital reading is. So, Kindle users, and … er … book readers alike: will you be heading down to your local Waterstones to join James Daunt at the devil's table, or is this turkeys voting for Christmas?
