
Photo by Shinya Suzuki via Flickr.
Amazon recently announced it will be closing all 68 of its bookstores and pop-up shops, Reuters first reported. This includes the Amazon Books which opened on the third floor of The Shops at Columbus Circle in 2017.
The Columbus Circle location was the seventh Amazon Books to open.
“Amazon said it would focus more on its grocery markets and a department store concept going forward,” reports Reuters.
It isn’t immediately clear when the Columbus Circle location will be closing, but notifications at all locations are expected to be delivered via window signage in the coming days and weeks.
The first Amazon Books opened in Seattle in 2015, and the Seattle Times was quick to call out the irony of the move. “Bookstore owners often think of Amazon.com as the enemy. Now it’s becoming one of them.”
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“It was a strange experiment to begin with,” wrote Curbed in its March 3 report that “Amazon Is Closing Its Terrible Brick-and-Mortar Bookstores.”
When the Columbus Circle store opened, the New Yorker described it as “reminiscent of an airport bookshop: big enough to be enticing from the outside but extremely limited once you’re inside,” while noting in its title that the stores were not designed for people who read.
According to Reuters, Amazon’s retail stores accounted for only 3% of its $137 billion in revenue last quarter, and that was “largely reflective of consumer spending at its Whole Foods subsidiary.”
Good riddance. These stores were horrid.
Good riddance!
Dare one hope it’s replaced by a real bookstore? (Surely it’s high time to bring back Coliseum Books, and what better location for it?)
Count me in with jms. Wouldn’t it be grand to have Coliseum Books back? A
real independent, along with the late, great Grand Central Books. Bring’em on!
You mean the former Posman Books, or am I forgetting something? I do seem vaguely to recall another, older bookstore in the same general spot.
Anyhow, bring ’em all back, I say! (Including, though they wouldn’t qualify as independents, the two B&N Sales Annex stores. Oh, and the Strand Annex on Fulton.)
It’s good to have a dream.
yes, and i hope George Leibson is reading this. larry w