Kindle News: Waterstone, soft rumors, Paramount movies to Prime

Kindle News: Bits and pieces - I'm on vacation this week and the news is mostly very soft rumors, most of them conflicting so until they firm up I don't tend to report them, but a bit on that further on down.

Waterstones in the UK has signed an agreement with Amazon to sell Kindles in the UK, although Waterstones had been said to be in talks with Barnes and Noble for international sales.  However, managing director James Daunt said in a statement. “The best digital readers, the Kindle family, will be married to the singular pleasures of browsing a curated bookshop. With the combination of “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,” Daunt told The Bookseller...
...
paidContent's article by Laura Hazard Owen ends with what what looks like a quote from The Bookseller:
"Daunt said the two businesses had started talking only ‘relatively recently,’ admitting that he had looked at other options but rejected them. ‘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.’ "

They have about 300 stores, so it is a real plus for Amazon and of course bad news for Barnes and Noble.

Rumors
The Kindle Fire rumor a couple of weeks ago was that they were working on an 8.9" tablet to be ready for the holidays, end of 2012 but that while some orders were underaway, there were no named companies as there were when rumors were stronger in the past.

Now it's a 10" model, others say but with no basis for the rumors. I think it's a slow newscycle and these articles invariably end with "What do you think will happen?"

We'll see.

Hundreds of Paramount movies being added to Prime
See TechCrunch for details.

More later...