Amazon opens physical bookshop

It will stock the most popular books from Amazon.com, and the prices will be the same as those offered on the website, reports The BBC.

Customers will also be able to try out Amazon’s devices, including the Kindle and its Fire TV.

Rival bookseller Waterstones said it hoped the venture “falls flat on its face”.

Amazon Books vice-president Jennifer Cast announced the online giant would open its “real, wooden doors” at the Seattle University Village on 3 November.

“Amazon Books is a physical extension of Amazon.com. We’ve applied 20 years of online bookselling experience to build a store that integrates the benefits of offline and online book shopping,” she said.

The shop will stock 5,000 books in the 5,500-sq-ft (510-sq-m) space, with the majority chosen on the basis of customer ratings, pre-orders, sales, popularity on reader recommendation site Goodreads, and the shop’s curators’ assessments.

James Daunt, managing director of Waterstones, was unimpressed, particularly with the decision to display books mainly “face out”.

“With only 5,000 titles in a space in which Waterstones would put over 10 times that number, it appears to be a tentative dip of the toe into physical bookselling waters.

Clearly, however, a skim of the bestsellers away from true bookshops would be very damaging: we very much hope that it falls flat on its face.”

Waterstones recently said that it would stop selling Amazon’s Kindle in its stores.