Jeff Bezos retraces his steps. The entrepreneur who founded Amazon it had engulfed the world of small and medium-sized publishing, opening the era of digital publishing as an almost absolute monopolist and becoming the first retailer in the world even without even having a shop, now it will have one. Indeed, a first Amazon Books had already been opened last year in Seattle, the city where twenty years ago the guru from Albuquerque launched the “Project Gazelle”, the one according to which "we must approach small publishers like a cheetah chasing a battered gazelle".
Amazon's "material" revolution will continue with the opening of other stores in the coming months: according to the Wall Street Journal, there will be at least 300-400 bookshops (real, in the flesh) that the e-commerce giant is ready to open throughout the United States. Precisely in the country where, according to data updated to 2014 and precisely "because" of the immense success of Amazon, many more have been closed than those Bezos is about to create: "In the mid-90s - he wrote in 2014 the New Yorker – there were about 4.000 bookshops in the USA: today there are less than 2.000, resulting in the loss of thousands of jobs”. A figure more than halved, with a significant impact on the labor market, which the entrepreneur of Greek origin will not have worried too much about, given that several US economists have defined working conditions at Amazon “ruthless” not to say “Taylorist”.
Now Amazon has second thoughts, but the long wave of this massacre has made it in time to arrive Europe: UK in 2014 it had only a thousand active bookstores, a third less than those of 2005. According to very recent data, only in Roma in the last four years, fifty bookstores have closed, more than a hundred in ten years. Small, but also large: think of the Feltrinelli in via del Babuino, the Mondadori Trevi, the Messaggerie.
Who knows if the new project, anticipated at the Wsj by Sandeep Mathrani, managing director of General Growth Properties, one of the largest shopping center operators, but not confirmed by the Seattle company, which indeed did not want to comment (and therefore not even deny). The objective fact is that Amazon seems really interested in expand its presence in the real world after having, in fact, conquered the virtual one. Greater contact with people would allow – according to plans – to further improve the quality of its services Shopping thus offering customers an ever better shopping experience.
An experience that would be "old-fashioned" but only up to a certain point. The real novelty that will differentiate the Amazon books from all the more classic bookstores is, in fact, that under each book users will find a tag in which to discover the rating of the volume present within Amazon.com. In addition to selling books, inside Amazon Books customers will be able to find and try out all the main Amazon devices such as Kindle and tablet computers Fire. A way to unite the old with the new and to revitalize the same market which, in the past, was raided.
