Amazon Makes Brick-And-Mortar Debut Today With Seattle Bookstore

In a move that is loaded with meaning — from irony to inevitability — Amazon, the online retailer that forever changed the business of selling books (and other things), imperiling Barnes & Noble and hastening Borders' demise, opens its first brick-and-mortar store today.

Amazon Books debuts at the University Village mall in Seattle, where it's headquartered, boasting an estimated 5,000 titles. The store will also offer shoppers the option to test out its proprietary devices such as its Kindle e-reader and Fire Tablet, Seeking Alpha reported.

Excitement brewed last year when the Wall Street Journal and other news outlets reported that Amazon took over office space at 7 West 34^th Street in Manhattan, across the street from the Empire State Building. The presumption was that an Amazon store was in the works in the location. It never happened. By contrast, Amazon Books, which seems to have come out of nowhere, has.

The store’s book selection will be based on customer ratings and pre-orders on Amazon.com .

Indeed, the nation’s biggest online retailer will leverage the reams of data it’s collected on shoppers’ buying preferences — and its proprietary algorithms for understanding that data — and stock its shelves according.

“We’re taking the data we have and we’re creating physical places with it,” Jennifer Cast, vice president of Amazon Books, told the Seattle Times.