At Amazon’s Bookstore, No Coffee but All the Data You Can Drink

A non-virtual, real-life Amazon bookstore opened in Manhattan on Thursday with no obvious signs of corporate guilt at having driven countless independent bookstores to oblivion with the scythe-like power of the company’s e-book discounting.

The store opened to a crowd waiting outside, some of them curious about the retro spectacle of a big-box bookstore, as if resurrected from the dead, selling actual books over the counter instead of the internet. All in the name of Amazon, the Colossus that ate the Indies.

“We’re all about discoverability,” said one of the friendly employees offering greetings and guidance. The store’s strategy is to mine Amazon’s massive online archives of reader data to steer the most popular books to shoppers. The circularity of this crème-de-la-crème process provides the sales leverage. The store stocks only 3,000 of the most popular, data-driven titles — for instance, a history best seller that’s been judged a good read by 2,796 previous readers, who gave it a 4.8 approval rating on a scale of 5. Collectively, the store boasts, its stock has received 1.7 million 5-star reviews from Amazon.com customers.

How to resist in this age of rampant populism? The question was once addressed by Robert Silvers, founding co-editor of The New York Review of Books, the enduring resource for dedicated readers in Gotham and beyond. Mr. Silvers preferred to mine the tastes and opinions of gifted writers and editors whom he chose for being able to offer all manner of bookish recommendations and delights, not least some serendipity. “We do what we want and don’t try to figure out what the public wants,” he explained unapologetically.

In venturing offline with its seventh brick-and-mortar store nationally, Amazon signals that it is on to something new in its ever expansive business outlook. We all may have thought that product delivery by drone was the next big Amazon thing. But the future turns out to be a typical retail store in the Time Warner Center off Columbus Circle. Another half dozen are due this year, including a second Manhattan store, on 34th Street.

The speculation is that dozens more are planned nationally and that Amazon, which already handles nearly half of the nation’s book sales, may eventually expand into selling far more products than the books and Kindle electronics the stores currently offer.

The store is tuned for speedy business, with sales via credit or debit cards, no cash. The privileges that come with Amazon Prime are quickly honored. No prices are evident; a customer runs a book under a scanner for Amazon’s shifting price system.

There’s no cafe to indulge idle time, and the floors don’t invite flopping with a book or a cranky toddler. Ask a worker about the narrow predictability of data mining, and the reply comes: “It’s data with heart.” Amazon says its recommendations include in-house “curators’ assessments” to add a variable touch to the crowdsourcing.

Still, the store lacks the little handwritten employee recommendations posted in independent bookstores as humanizing beacons. Amazon compensates at each book pile with a small placard featuring its percentiles of popularity and review notes from blurb-savvy customers (“Far beyond the ordinary…”).

“It’s weird — they keep talking about ‘discovery,’ but how do you discover something different in a process that channels people into a smaller and smaller focus?” asks Chris Doeblin, owner of the independent Book Culture store and two others in the city.

Rejecting Amazon’s strategy of stocking mainly data-tracked titles, Mr. Doeblin delights in offering more volumes ranging widely from best selling to barely known. “People are willing to pay more for a better experience, for a real choice,” he insists, having survived the challenge of Amazon online and now having to face its arrival as an actual store.