Waterstones sign Kindle deal with Amazon | e-books on the High Street

James Daunt, the MD of Waterstones, has announced a deal to sell the Kindle through the chain of bookshops.

Waterstones is the only big player left in books on the British High Street. The immediate reaction has been one of shock and disbelief. Many seem to think that the arrangement is great for Amazon, terrible for Waterstones.

James Daunt, Managing Director of Waterstones, said: "At Waterstones, we are committed to improving our bookshops quite radically to offer the best possible book buying experience. It is a truly exciting prospect to harness also the respective strengths of Waterstones and Amazon to provide a dramatically better digital reading experience for our customers.

"The best digital readers, the Kindle family, will be married to the singular pleasures of browsing a curated bookshop. With the combination of our talents we can offer the exceptional customer proposition to which we both aspire."

Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Founder and CEO, said: "Waterstones is the premier high street bookseller and is passionate about books and readers - a dedication that we share deeply. We could never hope for a better partner to bring together digital reading and the physical bookstore."

The pessimistic take is that Daunt appears to be inviting book buyers to browse his bookshops, then buy what they like the look of on their Kindle. This may well be why the chain is investing heavily in coffee shops. People will want to buy a coffee while they are at Waterstones. They may not be buying books.

The really surprising thing about the deal is that Daunt has made it clear in the past that he isn't an Amazon fan. The Telegraph reported comments in December in which he likened the Internet behemoth to Old Nick himself.

Most of Twitter seems to have decided that this is a terrible one. But perhaps it is inevitable. Most ardent readers will embrace the Kindle in the same ways as people embraced paperbacks: as an inexpensive, convenient medium to read books. The challenge for the likes of Waterstones but perhaps even more so for the publishers, is to stay relevant in this new arena.

Waterstones | Three for Twos | Pack Men by Alan Bisset

Follow, follow Rangers

Waterstones are having a management revamp following their purchase by, someone or other. It's just been leaked that they are dropping their three for two offer - cue thousands of people rushing to their local branch in order to stock up on 'freebies' before the offer is withdrawn altogether. I'm not rushing myself, you understand. Three for two is catchy but it's bloody annoying. The free one is always the cheapest. And how often have you stood scratching your head wondering what third book would be worth picking up, just so you can take advantage? Discounts on individual books would suit me better and might help them take on the online giant.

I was in Waterstones on Sauchiehall St, Glasgow last night. So were about a hundred other people to watch a local author, Alan Bissett, launch his new novel Pack Men.

Alan was nervous. The book is about Rangers fans who get mixed up in the drunken riot that took place in Manchester the day their team played in the UEFA cup final there in 2008. (That bit at least isn't fiction: Scottish teams did used to do quite well in Europe as recently as 2008...) Alan is apparently a little concerned how the Rangers fans will take to the book. Surely they will see it as criticism. I imagine some of them will. But Bissett feels that sectarianism and football are under-written-about topics in Scottish literature and he has decided to rise to the challenge. Good luck to him. The extracts he read out had some wit.

I was slightly amused - make that bemused - when I arrived for the reading, which was to take place in the Waterstones basement. The staff had erected a barrier across the stairs with a sign saying the basement was closed for the evening, and it came with the usual apologies. There was no mention that I could see of a reading event at all: an utterly strange and perplexing state of affairs. Myself and a small huddle of people stood by the sign for a few moments before deciding to totally ignore it, stepped to one side of the barrier and headed to the basement. No staff challenged us as we did this or tried to explain what was happening which struck me as a bit sloppy. Bissett sold quite a few books though, despite this... so well done him.

Would you pay for a book that Pat Kane and Terry Jones haven't written yet?

A couple of weeks or so ago I noticed a strange post on Pat Kane's Facebook page. Kane is a musician, writer, journalist, consultant and activist. Despite being utterly in the thrall of the SNP he's often worth listening to on media matters, which is why I befriended him on FB.
But the post in question really made me wonder.
Just to fill you in, Kane had a successful recording career with his band Hue and Cry. He's often in the public eye as a media and cultural critic and still plays live. He happens to live not so far away from me in Glasgow's West End and he is very interested and involved in social media.
Which is all fine and interesting. And my point, I guess, is that he's not starving in a garret somewhere.
Pat's latest project, some might say wheeze - and he 'launched' it in the traditional old fashioned papery Guardian - was to announce that he intends to write a book, Radical Animal, which would have an online social network element, and that he was looking for $10,000 (or £6K approx) to give him the time to write the MS.
Instead of getting a publisher to pay him an advance, he is offering the general public the chance to stump up for him instead. So if you are interested in reading Pat's as yet unwritten book, you could sponsor him to write it.
How many people out there, I asked myself, are so eager to hear Pat Kane's thoughts on a subject, any subject: eager enough to pay in advance for a man who tweets and appears regularly on traditional media outlets effectively for free?
Then the other day I saw a Tweet with a link to unbound.co.uk. This is another example of the net being used to democratise the book production process. This from their website: "What's different is that instead of waiting for them to publish their work, Unbound allows you to listen to their ideas for what they'd like to write before they even start. If you like their idea, you can pledge to support it. If we hit the target number of supporters, the author can go ahead and start writing..."
So Kane's pay up front idea is wider than just him (and I am sure there are other examples probably in the US: links welcome).
There is clearly something attractive about democratising publishing. Its appealing to think that we'll get the books we want if we remove these elitist publishers with their mad ideas about thrillers selling hundreds of thousands of copies and no one being interested in the poignant memoir of a 26-year-old former drama student who once did drugs at a party.
I don't think it's true, of course. Publishers bring more to the party than just a fancy cover and shelf space in Tesco, as important as those two elements are. But I can see why some people might get excited over the idea.
What puzzles me is how anyone thinks this pay-up-front model is at all viable. We live in a book economy in which publishers struggle to sell new paperbacks at half price through the megaonline marketplace of Amazon. Waterstones has just been sold to a Russian billionaire. Borders is gone. One key factor in their demise is over supply: too many books, depressed prices, consumers who want to spend less and less.
Then there is self-publishing. You can put your MS straight out into the marketplace on Kindle etc without a publisher getting involved. You reap the rewards yourself. But you don't get paid up front and the per unit price is necessarily low.
My question is: just who thinks there are enough readers out there with enough time and money to speculate on books - fiction, non fiction - which haven't been written yet?
A glance at the Unbound website tells me that each of their current offerings has a long way to go before they get funded. In fact, the best of them - a short story collection by Python legend Terry Jones - is 98 per cent short of its target, albeit with 48 days to go.
I wish Pat Kane good luck, I'll sit and watch the result with interest. Similarly with Unbound. But I don't see either of these schemes coming off. Not in any meaningful, sustainable way.
What do you think?