Calling it “a physical extension of Amazon.com,” the world’s largest retailer has opened its first “terrestrial” bookshop in Seattle’s University Village. It will stock a modest 5,000 to 6,000 titles, and is not meant as a showroom for either its own Amazon Publishing titles or self-published titles.
Reaction to anything Amazonian, of course, comes with the kind of drama and hype that we prefer to sidestep here at The Hot Sheet.
For years, there have been distracting rumors of Amazon opening physical stores. This time, it’s for real, and the industry debate is over how significant a development it might be. For some context, however, we can recommend Philip Jones’s commentary at FutureBook. Jones compares this move by Amazon to its creation of Amazon Publishing as a trade arm (not self-publishing) in 2011, and notes that trying to traditionally publish was not something Amazon knew how to do. “Amazon’s move into high street bookselling,” Jones writes, “has the whiff of this same vaulting ambition, except with one key difference. Amazon already is a bookseller.”
The Seattle storefront, Jones reminds us, is meant to be “a store that integrates the benefits of offline and online book shopping.” Can Amazon put “the heart” into bookselling at ground level? Jones asks. As we’ve advised elsewhere in this issue on country-specific KDP Select payouts, we wait, watch, evaluate.
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.
