Originally published at: Amazon to close 68 stores, including all bookstores | Boing Boing
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Sorry for the 100s of employees now out of work because this “experiment” didn’t help Bezos’ bottom line. I hope they find other jobs with other independent bookstores.
Never made a lot of sense. One of the reasons bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders were on the decline was because of Amazon’s online business and the rise of ebooks. Investing in brick and mortar stores was a wasteful step back.
Bookstores will forever hold a place in my heart/soul, Amazon/Bezos can fo f@ck off.
I have worked with the staff at the one here in Denver. The purpose of the store was not just bookstore, it was also sort of a brand play in that they carried a lot of Amazon electronics, and the book section was very toney
It is too bad they are closing them - the people that worked at the Denver store were people that liked books and there are only so many in person jobs like that left
I visited two of these ‘bookstore’ locations. They had less than 1/10th the books you’d see in a traditional book store of the same size. Almost zero back-catalog books were on the shelves. The stores looked inviting, but were a disappointment to me. 80% of the books I read now I borrow from my public library and read on my kindle.
Still boycotting Amazon. It’s easy & fun! Coming up on our two-year anniversary.
Where I am in Nashville, Tennessee there’s an Amazon bookstore in the Green Hills Mall and the independent Parnassus Books is right across the street.
Parnassus opened at a time when most brick and mortar bookstores were being driven out of business by Amazon and while some assumed it was a mistake I think a large part of its draw, aside from knowledgeable, helpful staff and a solid selection in spite of their size, is it’s not Amazon, which is why it was around before Amazon even thought about opening bookstores and looks set to be around long after.
Its never a good thing when bookstores close. I always love the idea of discovering something interesting to read by accident.
An interesting source for free books, magazines and comics
https://archive.org/
They ran out of bookstores to close, so they had to open up their own, just close to them down.
Hire-to-fire I guess.
Not as easy as I expected. I recently bought something on eBay and was dismayed to have it shipped to me as “a gift” from Amazon. This is against eBay’s TOS, but it doesn’t seem like they have much interest in stopping it.
I didn’t see any one talking about CHOAM but I see what you did there
I really want that version of CHOAM mug. Coincidentally, it’s not sold on Amazon.
Amazon had stores??
I found the “4 star” store to be generally useless for anything other than occasional very last minute gifts. So I actually am sorry to see it go. (Yes, buy local, be more personal in gifting and all that, but I don’t always have time for that.)
The Amazon bookstores were really disappointing. They didn’t have all that many books.
The Amazon bookstore at University Village in Seattle was even worse. It didn’t have cell phone service. That meant that when you scanned the book codes on a shelf to find out more, you got nothing. (Verizon and AT&T got nada. Maybe T-Mobile/Sprint worked?)
Pretty sure Amazon.com just opened bookstores to troll real bookstores.
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