In a surprising development UK bookseller Waterstones is to sell Amazon’s Kindle book reader.
But Waterstone’s alliance with Amazon was an unexpected move which initially looks like turkeys voting for Christmas.
Waterstones says the deal will dovetail with its current store refurbishment scheme, which is creating dedicated areas for digital books, free wireless internet and new coffee shops.
With almost 300 stores, Waterstones is the UK’s biggest bookseller.
As well as selling the Kindle device, Waterstones will allow Kindle users to digitally browse books and take advantage of Waterstones’ special offers.
However whilst Waterstones has little choice but to ally itself with Amazon, at least it is being a positive development.
Conversely last month, US retail company Target said that it would stop selling Amazon’s Kindle.
Thus whilst Kindle has a growing market share of digital book reading in the UK at least Waterstones will start to take a percentage of it.
So the old pragmatist adage of ten per cent of something being better than fifty per cent of nothing applies.