Amazon’s new store sells books on the high street – and it opens today
Online behemoth becomes bastion of the book store
It sounds like an ill-conceived joke at the expense of the 500 UK book stores that have closed since 2005, but – hold the cover – it’s true: Amazon really is opening its own bricks and mortar book store.
Not content with digital domination of the words-on-paper market, the Washington sales giant is today unlocking the doors on one of its first physical locations in Seattle’s University Village, to shift page-turners and tablets to pedestrian passers-by.
In a melding of real-world leafers with the marketplace that saw their stores made irrelevant, the Amazon shop will feature front-facing books complete with their user rating and selected comments from the website.
What’s more, prices on the shelf will match those on the web – so there’s no risk of Amazon doing to its own bookstore what it did to so many others.
This ain’t no pop–up, either: Amazon confirmed to The Verge that this will be a permanent location, meaning one more headache for the bookstore owners of Seattle’s 26th Avenue as their biggest online competitor brings its trade to the town, seven days a week.
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Is this the next step in Amazon’s domination of all things media? Well, the tech titan has made no secret of its desires to open physical stores on a broader scale and, whilst its Seattle store is very much about the books, you can also pick up Kindle, Echo, Fire TV and Fire Tablet devices from inside its wall-less building.
With the ever more feature-packed Prime subscription service causing sinus strain for independent media outlets, filling physical locations with its products – tree-made or otherwise – is unlikely to make that monopoly go away. In fact, with buttons on your appliances and tablets in your palm, Amazon is cementing its position as the go-to guru for, well, everything.
Perhaps this was the goal all along: wipe out the high-street opposition, swoop in and steal the show. According to Amazon, “We’ve applied 20 years of online bookselling experience to build a store that integrates the benefits of offline and online book shopping.” Only time – and the response of Seattle’s residents – will tell whether this is a match made in hardback heaven.
Chris Rowlands
Freelance contributor 
