Less than a month after Borders UK went out of business, an even bigger UK bookstore chain, Waterstone’s, appears to be in jeopardy of doing the same. After a year that saw the company make a series of highly questionable business decisions –  opening a new, extremely expensive, state-of-the-art warehouse that couldn’t seem to ship books (see the Moby report), relying heavily on celebrity tomes to become mega-bestsellers even though sales the previous year of such fare had fallen (and proved even worse this year), ordering staffers not to read press critical of the company (see the Moby report) — company head Gerry Johnson stepped down late last week. Now, Catherine Neilan reports in a Bookseller story that there’s “a bleak prognosis for the future” of the company.

She notes others who agree:

• In a commentary for The Independent, Boyd Tonkin says “the book chain’s likely future looks as slim as one of those volumes of poetry that you won’t find in its celebrity-heavy outlets,” and he calls the collapse “worse than carelessness … too many people no longer want Waterstone’s as the leading character in their own romance with the printed page.”

• Michael Holroyd, president of the Royal Society of Literature, writes in a Guardian commentary that Waterstone’s “had no real interest in books and was not looking to the future.” Also: “Its policy of looking backwards and following what sold well last year or the year before has now hit the buffers.”

• And Andrew Hill, writing in a report for Financial Times, says Johnson’s successor, Dominic Myers, “will have his work cut out.” Still, Hill is the only one holding out hope: “Waterstone’s has a strong brand and, with about 25 per cent of the market, just needs to convince the literati to return. This is not yet the end of the story.”

What none of them comment on, unfortunately, is what they think this means for British writers, authors … and readers.