Waterstones completes exit from e-books market

Waterstones is to pull out of e-books after announcing that from this summer onwards it will refer its online customers instead to the Japanese digital book specialist Kobo.

Existing online customers were notified of the impending change at the weekend. From 14 July, they will receive email instructions informing them how to transfer their online library, the BBC notes. New customers will simply be redirected to the Kobo website.

Waterstones's chief executive James Daunt told The Bookseller he was making the move because the store's e-books offering was not "to the standard or the ability I would like”. He says the likelihood that Waterstones could overhaul its digital sales in order to compete with the likes of Amazon was "increasingly remote".

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Daunt says the store will not suffer a serious financial hit as the business sold "really not very many" e-books and would take a cut of all new sales referred through its website.

The move marks the end of an unsuccessful foray into e-books for Waterstones, which was one of the first book stores to try to get ahead of the digital revolution when it started selling Sony e-readers back in 2008.

Since then, Engadget notes, Waterstones has tried to launch its own device and then welcomed Amazon's Kindle, before reversing the trend last October by removing stocks of the devices from most stores.

Others too have been leaving the sector as Apple and, to a lesser extent, Kobo come to dominate. Barnes & Noble, the US bookseller, pulled the plug on its Nook service in March, while last year and the year before respectively Tesco and Sony closed their platforms and switched readers to Kobo.

Waterstones has been focusing instead on overhauling its physical stores, introducing a membership scheme and improving the customer experience through initiatives such as the roll-out of in-store coffee shops.

Last year, after years in the doldrums, the company reported an increase in sales of one per cent to £378m and profits of £5.4m.

This comes at a time when the wider market is also apparently beginning to turn back to physical books, with sales up in the past two years according to Nielsen research. In contrast, consumer e-book sales fell by 11 per cent to £245m last year, the first fall since they arrived on the scene.