On Thursday, Amazon opened its first brick-and-mortar bookstore in New York City, in Columbus Circle. It is situated on the third floor of the Time Warner Center, a baffling place that, on any given weekday, seems populated exclusively by tourists, sharply dressed professionals taking two-hour lunch meetings, and people with the aura of those C.G.I. figures in architectural renderings—people who are there just because they’re there. The books in the Amazon bookstore—assembled according to algorithm—feel like that, too. They exist far less to serve the desires of the reader than to serve the needs of Amazon, a company whose twenty-year campaign to “disrupt” bookstores has now killed off much of the competition, usurped nearly half of the U.S. book market, and brought it back, full circle, to books on shelves.

The Columbus Circle location is Amazon’s seventh bookstore, so far. It is reminiscent of an airport bookshop: big enough to be enticing from the outside but extremely limited once you’re inside. The volumes on display are spaced at a courteous distance from one another, positioned with their front covers facing out. Greeting customers, front and center, is a “Highly Rated” table, featuring books that have received 4.8 stars or above on Amazon.com, among them Trevor Noah’s memoir, Chrissy Teigen’s cookbook, a book by the couple on the TV show “Fixer Upper,” and a book about kombucha. Other offerings are determined by digital metrics such as Goodreads reviews, Amazon sales, and pre-orders, and by input from the curators at Amazon Books. The store, in other words, is designed to further popularize, on Amazon, that which is already popular on Amazon. (The company’s new Amazon Charts feature, public online as of last week, is intended to challenge the best-seller list at the Times.)

At the right of the shop is a large, Best Buy-esque electronics area that’s mainly dedicated to the Amazon Echo. The Echo section occupies more space in the store than the section dedicated to fiction, which you’ll find on the left. Under the “G”s in the fiction section you’ll find: Roxane Gay, Hazel Gaynor, Paolo Giordano, William Golding, Bryn Greenwood, and Yaa Gyasi. That’s it. Only a handful of authors have two titles featured on the shelves: Margaret Atwood, Jane Austen, Paulo Coelho, Emma Donoghue, Ernest Hemingway, Jojo Moyes, Liane Moriarty, Haruki Murakami, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Marilynne Robinson, and J. D. Salinger. Only John Steinbeck and W. Bruce Cameron have three titles displayed: Cameron’s are “A Dog’s Purpose,” “A Dog’s Journey,” and “A Dog’s Way Home.” Over all, there are fewer than two hundred titles on offer in the fiction section, and three thousand titles in the store as a whole. For comparison, McNally Jackson, in SoHo, stocks about sixty thousand titles; my favorite indie bookstore—Literati, in Ann Arbor, where I went to grad school—stocks twenty-five thousand, with five thousand titles in fiction. _ _

It will be clear by now that I am not the ideal customer for the Amazon bookstore in the Time Warner Center. This doesn’t stem, necessarily, from my dislike of Amazon itself. I support the company’s terrible labor practices by making active use of my Prime membership, and I’m generally happy to buy books anywhere—the Barnes & Noble near my old office; Greenlight, my local indie; or, if I need something obscure quickly, Amazon. But a central draw of Amazon’s online bookstore is its limitless selection, and it’s odd to see the company’s brick-and-mortar outpost offering such a limited mix. Some sections in the bookstore seem organized like an ill-advised dinner party: in nonfiction, James Baldwin sits next to David Brooks, who’s above Ta-Nehisi Coates, who’s next to a book called “Pantsuit Nation,” which is based on a pro-Hillary Clinton Facebook group.

There are a few types of books that are served well by the Amazon bookstore. The shop’s layout does good work for the cookbook section, and it was nice to walk into Y.A. and see exactly what’s popular these days. (I was tempted to pick up a dystopian “Wizard of Oz” reboot called “Dorothy Must Die.”) But the store’s design drains the book-buying process of much of its pleasure. There are signs everywhere encouraging you to download the Amazon app and sign up for Prime. You have to scan a book’s bar code to find out its price. There are Amazon reviews underneath almost every title—Internet comments intruding on your book purchase by design._ _A snippet underneath Rachel Dolezal’s memoir urges readers to check out its “poignant depth.” In the children’s section, there is sometimes more text in the review blurbs than in the books themselves.

The store’s biggest shortcoming, though, is that it is so clearly not intended for people who read regularly. I normally walk into a bookstore and shop the way a person might shop for clothes: I know what I like, what generally works for me, what new styles I might be ready to try. It was a strange feeling, on Thursday, to do laps around a bookstore without feeling a single unexpected thrill. There were no wild cards, no deep cuts, no oddballs—just books that were already best-sellers, pieces of clothing I knew wouldn’t fit me or that I already owned.

Per a friend’s recommendation, I scanned the store for “White Tears,” by Hari Kunzru, and “The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley,” by Hannah Tinti. Neither was stocked. I saw “The Princess Diarist,” by Carrie Fisher, and remembered that I’d been wanting to read her previous book “Wishful Drinking,” but of course the store didn’t have it. Finally, I found something I wanted to read: Lidia Yuknavitch’s novel “The Book of Joan.” I scanned its bar code: $17.70 with my Prime membership. But, because I didn’t have the Amazon app on my phone, and didn’t want to download it, I needed to pay with a card linked to my Prime membership, and I had left my linked card at home.

So I left, and took the subway downtown to McNally Jackson, where, upon entering, I immediately saw six books that I didn’t know about or had forgotten I wanted to read. After wandering around browsing the shelves, I settled on “The Book of Joan” and the new Joshua Ferris story collection, both hardcovers. I had the brief thought that I could have saved some money by buying them from Amazon. Then I paid for them happily anyway.