And the souls mounting up to God, Went by her like thin flames - Dante Gabriel Rossetti
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Waterstones' MD calls Amazon ‘a devil’
HIGH STREET BOOKSELLER Waterstones has called online book store Amazon "a devil" in a no-holds-barred interview.
Managing director James Daunt was very vocal in an interview with the Independent, and said he was worried that soon all physical bookshops will be gone and replaced by just that one company. And worse still, he said Amazon is not a very nice company and does not work in the interests of its customers.
"They never struck me as being a sort of business in the consumer's interest," he said of Amazon. "They're a ruthless, money-making devil. The computer screen is a terrible environment in which to select books. All that, 'If you read this, you'll like that' - it's a dismal way to recommend books. A physical bookshop in which you browse, see, hold, touch and feel books is the environment you want."
Daunt is not afraid to follow the devil however, or tease it. "You'll walk into a Waterstone's and there'll be a bit of the shop where you can look at e-readers, play with them. We're inventing one of our own - perhaps we'll call it the Windle - and we're working on the Barnes & Noble approach," he said .
"They've embedded their own e-book, called the Nook, within their bookshops and have succeeded in taking market share from the Kindle. If the bookshop lets you have both and has a product every bit as good as the Amazon one, why wouldn't you do it with a bookshop?"
We called Waterstones about its MD's comments and are waiting a reply. We've also asked Amazon to comment and will update if it responds. µ
Tags: Hardware
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Oh dear the more i hear from Daunt the more he comes accross as a quixotic old boy, his internal messages seem vague and snobbish, all the comments are spot on, its the message not the medium, else wed all still be reading illuminated latin
For some reason there appears to be a fetish for words printed on paper as an information storage medium, with little to no regard for the actual information stored within. As such, booksellers have forgotten the purpose of books in the first place: to store and convey information in the most efficient means possible (for their time).
Indeed, it is the information itself, NOT the medium in which it is stored, that is of prime and essential importance. Information is valuable regardless of its container - a book without information, on the other hand, is not.
I'm sure you'll be delighted when all the stores in the high street are betting shops or charity shops! Soon the only places you'll be able to buy anything from will be Tesco and Amazon, what a lovely world! To also say that bookshops screwed the customer with the net book agreement is really getting desperate. All shops had to sell the books at a fixed price not just Waterstone's and that agreement (agreed by the publishers and retailers) ended over a decade ago. With libaries closing down it will be a desperate world where there won't be anywhere people can discover reading. I'm sure if Waterstone's goes under then we can all rejoice in thousands of redundancies!
U.K. bookstores screwed us for years with the Net Book Agreement.
Books are proffered by Amazon arrive using free delivery within a few days. We can 'look inside' books and we can read book reviews by real readers online. We can order much more too.
Years ago we would have to wait several weeks for a book shop to order in a book.
If we need information urgently, there's a good chance we can get it immediately as a Kindle download (which, incidentally, are priced around twice what they should be).
Anyone who enters a book shop has mush for brains or time to waste.
Good riddance to one more out-dated hang-over from the past: book shops have got their comeuppance :-)))
There are quite a few small bookstores that have been put out of business by large stores like Waterstones. It's hard to be sympathetic when the big fish that has just eaten the little fish is then eaten by a bigger fish.
If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.