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Home / News / Amazon’s new store sells books on the high street – and it opens today

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.

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.

[Source: Amazon / The Verge]

Profile image of Chris Rowlands Chris Rowlands Freelance contributor

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Formerly News Editor at this fine institution, Chris now writes about tech from his tropical office. Sidetracked by sustainable stuff, he’s also keen on coffee kit, classic cars and any gear that gets better with age.

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