For those folks who have been shopping from Amazon over the years, or those complaining that Amazon was driving the brick and mortar stores out of business, then this story is for you.
According to the Seattle Times, Amazon will be opening a store in the University District at 9:30am tomorrow morning. While many major book stores have been forced to close in the past several years, this is the first time that the entirely online Amazon has ventured into the physical store aspect.
Many have been surprised by this turn of events, however, the former Mac-A.P.P.L.E. magazine editor, Frank Catalano talked about this exact type of thing happening in his article from 1999 entitled Pixels and Brick (http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/1694034/pixels-and-brick).
While many users do still want the physical store to browse books, don’t expect just any book to appear at the store. According tot he article, there will be only the most popular books, ones that are attuned to the state and since this is a Seattle only venture for the time being, the high probability is that they will be Seattle, Washington, or Pacific Northwest related books or ones that local folks would be interested in according to Amazon’s massive amounts of data on local buyers of books.
For more on this, check out the Seattle Times report at:
http://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-opens-first-bricks-and-mortar-bookstore-at-u-village/