“A lot of our customers work at Amazon,” said Tracy Taylor, the general manager at the Elliott Bay Book Company, one of the city’s largest independent booksellers. The store, about a mile from Amazon headquarters, last year earned what Ms. Taylor called the “first substantial profit” in almost 20 years, enough to even pay employee bonuses.

Whether it is Amazon or something else, the broader pattern is unmistakable, said Oren J. Teicher, the chief executive of the American Booksellers Association, a national bookstore trade group. “Seattle has become one of the most successful independent bookstore cities in the country,” he said.

Tom Nissley, 46, a writer and former Amazon employee with 10 years at the company who lives with his family in northern Seattle, embodies this odd new détente. In his old life, he was a senior editor, helping Amazon promote and choose featured book titles for its website. Then, in 2010, he won enough money on the television quiz show “Jeopardy!” — about $235,000 as an eight-game champion — to quit his day job and write full time, publishing last fall a compendium of literary history and trivia, called “A Reader’s Book of Days.”

Last month, Mr. Nissley’s bookish-in-Seattle tale came full circle when he signed a contract to buy and run his own small independent bookstore. The shop, Santoro’s, which he plans to rename Phinney Books, is in a neighborhood, Phinney Ridge, with plenty of Amazon employees, many of whom Mr. Nissley knows as former colleagues or neighbors, and who he hopes will shop at his store (or at least come in to offer commiseration and advice). The purchase price, essentially the value of the inventory, was $35,000.