The story is rather simply. Waterstones will sell the Kindle and Kindle ebooks to customers both in store and on their website. And that’s about all anyone knows about it until September.

In fact, given the long delay between today’s announcement and September, I would bet that the deal is either still under negotiation or it was just finalized. At best, the ink is still drying.

On a side note, a few weeks back I wrote that the B&N-Waterstones deal was taking too long so it had likely fallen through. I wish I had taken myself more seriously, because it looks like that was right around the time that Watersones started seriously talking with Amazon.

According to James Daunt, the managing director for Waterstones, “We asked ourselves, ‘what do our customers want?’; the answer was the Kindle. Once we’d done that this was self-evidently the best deal.”While the B&N talks are rumored to have started back in November 2011, the negotiations with Amazon had started only “relatively recently”.As he explains it, “Ultimately, when we thought about it, we had to give the customers what they wanted. And the best device on the market is the Kindle.”

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