Scalper1 News
E-commerce leader Amazon.com ( AMZN ) is taking another step on the road to establishing a brick-and-mortar presence in books. The San Diego Union-Tribune reported Saturday that the company plans to open a second physical bookstore — the first is in its home city of Seattle — at the Westfield UTC shopping mall, adjacent to Tesla ( TSLA ) and Apple ( AAPL ) stores. It will be called Amazon Books. The Amazon store will likely be similar to the Seattle location and feature books that got the best reviews on the company’s website. It also will sell products from the company’s expanding hardware business, including Kindle e-book readers, Fire TV set-tops, Fire tablets and Amazon’s virtual personal assistant play, Echo. “We are excited to be bringing Amazon Books to the University Town Center Mall in San Diego, and we are currently hiring store managers and associates,” Amazon spokeswoman Sarah Gelman told the Union-Tribune . “Stay tuned for additional details down the road.” Amazon is widely cited for hastening the slow demise of the bookstore business, with the online sales king originally billing itself as the world’s biggest bookstore thanks to its endless online inventory. It has been said to use cutthroat tactics on publishers to get favorable pricing. In afternoon trading on the stock market today , Amazon stock was down 3%, near 557. Shares are up 18% since touching a six-month low of 474 in early February. The company has an IBD Composite Rating of 80, where 99 is the highest. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Apple’s appeal over allegations of e-book price-fixing. The court’s decision will mean that Apple will have to fork over $450 million to e-book purchasers. Apple was attempting to disrupt the near-monopoly held by Amazon. Scalper1 News
Scalper1 News