Tesco Drops Blinkbox Books After No Buyers Found

Tesco has dropped its Blinkbox Books service after no buyers came forward to pick up the waning service. 60 jobs will now be at risk.

Waterstones, one of the UK’s biggest high street book retailers, had been involved in talks to purchase the service, but the efforts were unfruitful.

A spokesperson for Tesco said: “We have taken the decision to close our eBook service Blinkbox Books.

“We’ve learnt a lot since launching the service and whilst we saw encouraging levels of take up, we believe that we can do more for our customers by focusing on our core business. The service will close by the end of February.”

Blinkbox was created in 2012 after Tesco took on Mobcast, a digital book service, for £4.5m.

Blinkbox Music sold for £5m

Tesco also announced today that Australian music streaming firm Guvera has bought Blinkbox Music for £5 million in an attempt to bolster its efforts in Europe.

Blinkbox Music was effectively bought for £12m by Tesco in 2012, back when it was called We7. Earlier in January, Blinkbox Movies was sold to Talk Talk for around £30m.

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