You can now buy Amazon Books in an actual non-internet bookstore.
What an innovative concept! You can actually pick up the books and flip through them! Having undermined the concept, they’re now going to embrace it. In one bookstore, at least.
They say that “virtually all the books are presented face-out”, but in the first and third photo I see plenty of book presented only spines out.
So they’re only going to sell popular books? I’ll stick to my favourite independent bookstore, where the sellers are book lovers and can recommend me something different and interesting.
This guy predicted it couple of months back. I thought was funny, not sure if he’s right about everything else though.
It looks like the goal is to sell highly rated books, not highly popular books. Based on the example book sections, it also looks like they’re using some data mining to pinpoint target audiences.
It looks to me like all the spines-out books in those photos are up high where you can’t really see them anyway. Which raises the question of why you’d have bookshelves up so high anyway. I can’t be sure they’re actual books, and not wallpaper or something.
So is this just a publicity stunt or is there an actual point to it?
I don’t know what to think of this. I have self-published books on Amazon and I can say, for a fact, that a couple months ago they re-jiggered their algorithms so that any book that wasn’t already a bestseller is now completely screwed. My sales went from “comfortable fun money” to “virtually nothing” overnight. Clearly they’re very much in the business of promoting what’s already selling–which puts the lie to this book store being somehow different than any other.