I for one will be pleased if it goes back to people who care about books, not just with pile-em-high strategies

I just had a brief daymare in which Tim Waterstone buys back the chain, reverts it to the good old days and then the world of publishing discovers that the good old days really weren't all they were cracked up to be.

Very best of luck and good wishes to the hard working Waterstone's booksellers and head office staff at what is going to be a very stressful time.

I find it fascinating that outsiders seem stuck with the view that Waterstone's sales will hugely improve simply by not being owned by HMV Group.

Whoever owns the company will still face the exact same issues - a dramatic fall off of shoppers on the high street, continuing competition from digital and online outlets, and a shrinking of the physical book market, all against a background of increasing rents.

If anyone genuinely thinks Waterstone's will suddenly clear out all the (highly selling) stationery and children's non-book, and massively reduce its discounting and return to a golden age of full-price literary snobishness under a new owner, they have zero understanding of the realities facing the business.

The issue that commonly erupts on this site is that, sadly, the decisions made to keep the company in business do not bring Waterstone's closer to the rose-tinted image people fondly have of the bookselling world.

We must let Waterstone's do what it needs to survive, even though it might not end up as the bookshop some people dream it ought to be.

Whoever owns it will not be able to change the realities of the market to allow this dream to come true.

A real shame that, having been at the forefront of ebook sales when the Sony Reader launched (something they are not given enough credit for) they were overtaken by the proprietorial devices from Amazon and Apple.

That in itself might not have been so bad if the buffoons at Sony hadn't decided to leave wireless off their NextGen device and basically lumber Waterstone's with a dated and out of step set of machines.

They need a Nook and they need one badly.

No one knows what will happen to Waterstones. Lets just wish the chain and all who sail in her - including my daughter who works for them - well. Lets hope the great staff get the management they deserve in a rapidly changing environment and not another senior management team who either dosen't know or dosen't care.

With such amazing decisions as purple shirts and throwing money in the POS fire is it any wonder?
We've gone from smart knowledgable looking folk to the staff you'd see in best buy (only looking for money not customers)
And the pos is a joke. Cover one message with another, printing errors every month,
Now we can't even pay the fishes wages (tanks for sale)
Our staff are leaving left and right.

I worked under Tim Waterstone and loved it, but I'm under no illusion that there might be some return to a golden age (unless someone brings back that NBA and shuts down the internet!). There's no getting away from the fact that the old Waterstone's formula won't work for the entire chain, but it could work for 50-100 branches in towns and cities that have heavy book buyers (remember, Daunts and Foyles are thriving) who aren't driven by price. That's the dilemma facing a future owner.

The sad truth is that people used to love Waterstone's, even when it had stopped being good. But the brand's image is now at an all-time low, in spite of the fact that the chain performs well in surveys of customer service. What has gone wrong?

The chain needs a radical change at the top, with some people who can restore the company's status as a serious bookseller, but others who can fully embrace the digital age in a way that the chain still hasn't done.

As someone has mentioned, it's a great pity that the Sony e-reader wasn't 3G - once again, Amazon have stolen the march on the competition. As for Waterstone's.com, it has terrible reviews on the internet, written by a succession of disgruntled customers. They have to get the website right.

A future owner should also take a long hard look at why chains like Ottakar's and Hammicks were so popular with customers (and publishers). Perhaps it's because they trusted their shop staff to know their local market, placed a great value on staff morale and didn't saddle people with pointless, labour-intensive tasks like stickering and destickering the children's section within a few days. They also didn't burden their staff with a stock control system that looked like an MS-DOS program from 1989.

I think most of us want Waterstone's to not only survive, but thrive. The chain had no future under HMV and would have gone under with its owner. I'm cautiously optimistic that better times might lie ahead for the booksellers and customers who still care about bricks and mortar bookselling.

I think the problem with Waterstone's has been their whole branding issue, and their trying to make every branch the same.
They need to let each branch buy with an eye on their market; mass buying and scale-outs from head office simply doesn't work. If it did, they wouldn't be in this position.
Books Etc had it right but were dragged down by Borders and the buffoon that was Philip Downer.
Hopefully, Waterstone's will pull through (in whatever evolved form) and remain the 'name' bookseller on the High Street.

Anonymous - they are 'national' as they have an estate that covers the nation, and 'specialist' as they specialise in books (with some other product alongside, but overwhelmingly books). So 'national specialist bookseller' is correct, and important. Go buy a book and stop trying to be clever.