Amazon opened its first bookstore in the Washington D.C. area last week, a real brick-and-mortar storefront on ritzy M street in Georgetown, and is attracting the kind of attention you would expect. “An Amazon bookstore? What the hell?” one woman exclaimed to her friend, stopping for a double-take on the sidewalk outside.
What the hell, indeed. Amazon has opened 15 bookstores since 2015 in major cities nationwide. Seattle got the beta version, selling 6,000 select titles alongside Amazon’s tech offerings. You can now browse physical bookshelves in Manhattan, Chicago, San Diego, and a dozen other cities. Bethesda, Maryland, will receive its own location in the near future.
Amazon uses its algorithms to determine which books will sell best based on what’s proving successful online, both nationally and locally. Instead of a traditional bookstore that’s organized by non-fiction, fiction, and genre, Amazon groups together “Most Wished-For Travel Books of the Past Decade” and “Nonfiction Top Sellers in Washington D.C.” If you live in one of the 64 percent of U.S. households that have an Amazon Prime account, you get the same discount in-store that you would get online. There are no price tags to be seen anywhere, but through the Amazon app, your smartphone can ‘read’ the title like a barcode and tell you the price. Below each book is a black card displaying a selected Amazon customer review, and the number of stars the title has earned. The store features books with ratings of at least 4.0 stars, as well as new releases and Amazon best-sellers.*
The overall impression is elegant. It looks like a traditional bookstore, but calmer, more feng shui. Each book sits on its particular shelf as if it were on a pedestal, cover fully visible, and comfrortably spaced from its neighbor. Five or six staff members with iPads are milling throughout the two floors ready to explain, really, how does a cashless store work, and to help you recover your Amazon prime password. Find a book that looks interesting and get yourself a table at the coffee bar downstairs. It’s operated by Allegra Coffee, which is owned by Whole Foods Market, which was recently bought by Amazon, according to the Washington Post, which is owned by the founder and chief executive of Amazon, Jeff Bezos.
It’s worth asking why Amazon, an ephemeral online giant, would bother with brick-and-mortar. When the first store opened in Seattle, Richard Mollet, chief executive of the Publishers Association, told the Guardian that having a physical location appealed to Amazon for the same reasons Apple opened its tech stores—to better serve its customers and reinforce the company’s brand. “This is a vote of confidence in the physical book and the physical book store, Mollet said. “Book stores have been imperiled in recent years, but even Amazon has seen the benefit of a physical browsing experience.”
This month, the Washington Post reported a “resurgence,” and the New York Times quoted a store owner declaring a “renaissance” for independent book sellers. In D.C., Shakespeare and Company is returning to the West Side, and Politics and Prose is opening two new locations in the Union Market and Wharf neighborhoods. But if you’ve seen the rom com You’ve Got Mail, you’ll remember that large booksellers such as Borders and Barnes & Nobles rolled over small neighborhood book stores before anyone even heard of Amazon. Nostalgia and goodwill failed to save Meg Ryan’s little storefront from Tom Hanks incorporated Fox Books, and the juggernaut of Amazon then swept those companies aside with no trouble. The business receives 40 cents of every dollar U.S. consumers spend online, but Bezos started the whole thing as an online bookstore. He changed the company name from Cadabra to Amazon because the Amazon River was the biggest river in the world and he planned to make his bookstore equally dominating
A sign of Bezos’ success: his new bookstore’s location at 3040 M Street used to be a Barnes & Noble.
*Correction, March 21: The article originally mistakenly claimed that all the books for sale had ratings of 4.8 stars or higher.
