"Waterstones to sell Amazon Kindle"

The Amazon Kindle.

Waterstones has struck a deal with Amazon to sell the Kindle, its ereader, despite the managing director of the high street bookseller calling the online retailer a “ruthless devil” last year.

The deal will see Waterstones sell the ereader and other digital reading services from Amazon as part of its high street makeover.

However, the partnership marks somewhat of an about turn for the UK bookseller. Last December James Daunt, managing director of Waterstones, lashed out at Amazon.

“They never struck me as being a sort of business in the consumer's interest. They're a ruthless, money-making devil," he said.

In an interview with the Independent, Mr Daunt insisted that there was a place for bookshops, despite the dominance of online bookseller Amazon.

He said last December: "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."

His comments echoed those he made in an interview with the Telegraph last October, in which he described Amazon as "dispiriting" and "utterly utterly ruthless".

Waterstones was bought by Russian billionaire Alexander Mamut last summer and Mr Daunt was hired to turn around a pattern of falling sales as online competition grows.

Mr Daunt also said Waterstones was working on its own e-reader.

"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. They've embedded their own e-book, called the Nook, within their bookshops and have succeeded in taking market share from the Kindle," he said.

As part of this new deal, Waterstones customers who have a Kindle, will be able to digitally browse books and other Waterstones offers in the areas of shops which have free wifi.

Mr Daunt said of the arrangement: “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.”

There was no update provided about the progress of Waterstones’ own ereader.