(Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc is set to open its first physical book store in Seattle on Tuesday, the company said.
The brick-and-mortar store, Amazon Books, is a physical extension of Amazon.com with books being selected based on customer ratings and pre-orders on Amazon.com.
Popularity on Goodreads and curators’ assessments are also considered for short listing the books. The in-store and online prices of the books would be same, Amazon said on Monday.
The store will also have an option to test drive Amazon’s devices such as Kindle, Echo, Fire TV and Fire Tablet.
Amazon Books, which is located in Seattle’s University Village, will be open every day except Thanksgiving and Christmas Day, the company said.
(Reporting by Rishika Sadam in Bengaluru; Editing by Gopakumar Warrier)
What’s a “Barnes & Noble”?
Am I crazy? Didn’t I recently read, (perhaps even at Nate’s site), that both dead-tree books and bookstore sales had notably increased market share?
(Also, Dave, have you considered changing your twit bio to “Geek blogger, powered by nerd rage and Reuters”?)
Life support kindly provided by Reuters. “Helping bloggers phone it in since 1982.”
Pretty tasty scathing Ars review of the store…
“Does Amazon’s new brick & mortar (and glass) book store have a cafe? That’d probably be the only way to lure me in.”
Dude. If you’re going to fly to Seattle just for coffee, there are probably better options.
Ars review?? Surprise not all bookstores are not created the same, they never were. More internet recycling of an old idea.
“Am I crazy? Didn’t I recently read, (perhaps even at Nate’s site), that both dead-tree books and bookstore sales had notably increased market share?”
Not specifically related to the Amazon store, but along the lines I mentioned above, I just noticed an interesting article on the above topic.
The always-worth-reading Ben Thompson had speculated that the publishers were winning a Pyrrhic victory by triumphing over Amazon to get eBooks priced higher than the dead-tree versions. And that above article seems to offer pretty conclusive proof of his speculation. Declining eBook sales due to the price increases have resulted in rather significant overall revenue and profit drops for the publishers.
Pyrrhic victory, indeed.