Amazon may open a brick-and-mortar bookstore and cafe in the Hudson Yards development on the west side of Manhattan, reports The New York Post. The deal may not be closed just yet, but The Post says Amazon is serious about the location and is moving forward with a deal. A store in New York City would be Amazon's third location, after its first physical bookstore in Seattle and a second planned store in San Diego.

It sounds counter-intuitive for the world's largest online bookseller to open a retail store identical to those it helped put out of business. However, Amazon is using its physical presence to both sell books and promote Kindle products. It follows the philosophy of Apple and other tech companies that use brick-and-mortar locations as both storefronts and marketing tools. Amazon also happens to have a growing ecosystem of popular hardware products, like the Echo speaker, that could benefit from in-store displays and salespeople at some point in the future.

In a shareholder meeting back in May, CEO Jeff Bezos said the company would continue its bookstore expansion. "We’re definitely going to open additional stores, how many we don’t know yet," Bezos said at the time. "In these early days, it’s all about learning, rather than trying to earn a lot of revenue."