Last year and in what seemed like an ironic twist, Amazon launched their first brick-and-mortar store in Seattle called Amazon Books. Following that launch, a report from earlier this year suggested that Amazon had plans to open more stores, but the company had declined to comment on the speculation at that time.
Turns out the speculation was right on the money because according to Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos, he has confirmed during Amazon’s annual shareholder meeting that the company does indeed have plans to launch more physical stores across the country, and that the next location that they will be launching in would be San Diego with construction already underway.
According to Bezos, “We’re definitely going to open additional stores, how many we don’t know yet. In these early days it’s all about learning, rather than trying to earn a lot of revenue.” For those unfamiliar with the concept of Amazon Books, at its core it is basically a bookstore. However the difference is that it will also sell Amazon products like Kindle e-readers.
In addition, there will also be human curation involved in choosing what books to stock. There will also be little snippets of customer reviews from Amazon’s website to give readers an idea of what to expect. Like we said it’s a bit ironic considering that the whole premise of Amazon was to do away with the need for brick-and-mortar outlets, but at the same time being a bookworm myself, I can’t deny the wonderful experience you get when visiting a bookstore, versus browsing online.
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