A little less than a year ago, Amazon opened its first brick-and-mortar bookstore in its hometown of Seattle, and apparently it’s doing well enough that Amazon is moving ahead with stores in other locations across the country.
Earlier this month, Amazon opened up its second bookstore location in San Diego, CA, and has announced plans for stores in Chicago, Portland, and Boston. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of Amazon’s stores, here’s what you need to know:
- They have a relatively small square footage when compared to Barnes & Noble. The most recently opened store is 3,500 square feet, and the average Barnes & Noble is ten times that size, sometimes more.
- All the books are face out, so the emphasis is on curation.
- No prices are listed; customers have to check book prices on their phones. The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that the sales staff’s most frequent refrain is, “Do you have the Amazon app on your phone?”
Perhaps even more interesting: Amazon is investing in pop-up stores across the country. Such efforts are separate from the bookstore initiative and focus on promoting Amazon’s hardware, particularly the Echo; each has a small footprint—about 300 to 500 square feet—and they are found primarily in malls. According to Business Insider, “Given Amazon’s obsession with data, the decision to expand the network of stores may indicate that the company has seen an uptick in online sales in the regions where it already has pop-up stores.” You can find a list of current pop-up stores at the Amazon website.
Meanwhile, Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch reports that Barnes & Noble sales dropped 6.6 percent compared to a year ago, with declining book sales as the culprit, even though print book sales are up nationally by 5.7 percent. The Wall Street Journal writes that new B&N leadership believes the bookseller “‘shot itself in the foot’ by cutting store personnel and aggressively reducing in-store inventory.” In addition to rectifying those problems, the company will reduce its Nook device footprint in its stores; Nook device sales continue to decline by about 25 percent each quarter, with digital content sales down 19 percent. Read more at Publishers Marketplace.
Bottom line: Some media analysts have speculated that it matters little how much Amazon profits from its stores; the real play is about customer data-harvesting, particularly in relation to dynamic pricing, and selling such methods to other retailers. For more on this theory, we recommend this On the Media episode.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
