High-street bookshop Waterstones has signed a commercial agreement with Amazon that’ll see Kindle digital devices and ebooks being sold through its UK shops. The company has already planned to incorporate dedicated digital areas and free WiFi access as part of its 2012 store refurbishment plans.
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.”
Waterstones currently sells ebooks in ePUB or PDF formats.
Further details of the agreement will be announced in the Autumn.