Unable to resist any opportunity to sell you something, the e-commerce leader is opening up brick-and-mortar bookstores. But its online prowess doesn’t yet translate into a very good retail experience.
As I pull my phone from my pocket and start snapping pictures, I feel like a private eye, or even a secret agent. I’ve just walked into Amazon Books, the Web giant’s flagship bookstore in Seattle, but my intentions have little to do with shopping. I’m on a reconnaissance mission.
Like many authors, I have a love-hate relationship with Amazon. The love is transactional. Amazon sells about a third of all printed books purchased in the country, and some two-thirds of all e-books. The hate is a form of mistrust. The company’s size gives it immense power, and it has at times acted like a predator, trying to dictate the terms of bookselling while showing contempt for the traditions of publishing. I’m not entirely sure whether Amazon wants to be my benefactor or my undertaker.
So here I am, behind frenemy lines, taking photographs of shelving.
As I pull my phone from my pocket and start snapping pictures, I feel like a private eye, or even a secret agent. I’ve just walked into Amazon Books, the Web giant’s flagship bookstore in Seattle, but my intentions have little to do with shopping. I’m on a reconnaissance mission.
Like many authors, I have a love-hate relationship with Amazon. The love is transactional. Amazon sells about a third of all printed books purchased in the country, and some two-thirds of all e-books. The hate is a form of mistrust. The company’s size gives it immense power, and it has at times acted like a predator, trying to dictate the terms of bookselling while showing contempt for the traditions of publishing. I’m not entirely sure whether Amazon wants to be my benefactor or my undertaker.
So here I am, behind frenemy lines, taking photographs of shelving.
"Bezos may love books, but what he loves even more is the idea of total victory, with no survivors among the vanquished."
After a half-dozen shots, I stow the phone and approach one of the four clerks in the store, a solicitous young man with a slightly antsy demeanor. He smiles when I ask why the leviathan of virtual retailing would bother opening a store in the real world. “We’ve accumulated 20 years of data on bookselling,” he replies, then adds, “And Jeff Bezos really, really loves books.” I sense he’s said these things before. I inquire about the store’s design, and he explains that it was modeled on the Amazon site. All the books are displayed with their covers facing outward, a visual echo of the thumbnail images that crowd the Web store. Beneath each volume is a small placard that displays the book’s Amazon star rating—only books that have earned at least four stars from Web buyers are stocked—and that also includes a brief excerpt from a customer review. One of the store’s displays offers “If you like this, you’ll love this” suggestions, a play on Amazon’s recommendation engine, while another promotes new books that racked up a lot of pre-orders online.
I wander to the center of the store, between the fiction and the nonfiction sections, and find a series of low tables displaying, in Apple Store fashion, samples of various gadgets that Amazon sells under its own brand. There’s the Kindle Paperwhite e-reader, the Fire HD tablet, and the Echo voice-activated virtual assistant, along with a selection of headphones, wireless speakers, and other accessories. At the head of the hardware aisle, facing the shop’s entrance, is a big television running Fire TV, Amazon’s set-top streaming box. A little boy is sitting on a bench in front of the screen, engrossed in the video game Crossy Road.
What’s Amazon doing with Amazon Books? That question has hung in the air ever since the Seattle store opened in November 2015. Speculation about the company’s motives intensified during 2016 when it opened two more bookstores, in San Diego and Portland, Oregon, and divulged plans for more in Chicago and suburban Boston. Since Amazon has said little about its strategy (it ignored my requests for comment), Wall Street analysts and tech writers have filled the void with conjecture. The stores are all about selling gadgets, goes one popular idea, with the books there just to lure customers. The stores are data-gathering machines, goes another, enabling Amazon to extend its tracking of customers into the physical world. Or maybe the company’s secret plan is to use the stores to promote its cloud computing operation, Amazon Web Services, to other retailers.
The theories are intriguing, and they may contain bits of truth. But the real impetus behind the stores is probably much simpler: Amazon wants to sell more books.
“Pure-play Web retailing is not sustainable.”
Not long ago, the common wisdom held that Amazon would remake the book business in its own image. Its Web store would kill off bookstores, and its Kindle would render physical books obsolete. In an interview in 2009, 18 months after the Kindle’s launch, Jeff Bezos suggested that the “great 500-year run” of the printed book was coming to an end. “It’s time to change,” he declared. Readers had a different idea. After an initial boom, sales of digital books went flat and then started to fall—in the mainstream trade-book market, e-book revenues dropped 11 percent in 2015 alone, according to the Association of American Publishers—while sales of printed books, far from collapsing, held steady. Bookstores, too, have been making a comeback, led by small, independent shops. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, sales in bookstores grew 2.5 percent in 2015, the first uptick since 2007, and the growth rate strengthened to 6.1 percent during the first half of 2016. The number of newly opened bookshops has also been on the rise....MUCH MOREPreviously on the Predatory Pricing channel:
October 9, 2014
It"s All been a Bright and Shiny Lie: Amazon to Open Physical Store In New York (AMZN)
...The first half of the headline is a riff on "A Bright and Shining Lie", the title of a book about Paul Vann and the American experience in Vietnam.For our younger readers: Vietnam is a country the U.S. invaded in the early 1960's.
The book won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer.
Pulitzer is pronounced Pull-it-sir,
