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Will We Soon Be Shopping at an Actual Amazon Retail Store?
Image by Oleg Golovnev via Shutterstock
Just when you thought your days of browsing a big-box national book retailer store were as numbered thanks to the demise of Borders and the fading of Barnes & Noble comes word e-tailer giant Amazon is prepping to launch a physical store. In fact, they are looking to turn Amazon into a national chain, according to Gawker.
A pilot location is planned for Amazon's headquarters city of Seattle, and if that goes well, more could follow elsewhere. "The pilot location will focus on Kindles and accessories. It's not clear if the store will even stock books," adds Gawker, pointing out that books published by Amazon have been boycotted from being sold at chains like B&N and Books-A-Million, to name just a couple.
But perhaps this doesn't matter to Amazon, who may be looking to the retail space enterprise as another way to get people to buy the books they make and sell. "Amazon launching their own store will give customers a way to physically buy books and also sample ebooks via WIFI when they are in a physical location," notes Good E Reader, the site who landed the scoop on the Amazon store.
What's the Amazon store going to look like? They have already contracted what's known as a shell company to do the design, but rumor has it their model is the Apple store, so it's likely rather than the slightly more boisterous version of the library-meets-living room vibe of present and past big box bookseller chains, Amazon's storefront might be more of a shiny, glassy portal to the future of books.
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