Joan Verdon

Staff Writer, @JoanVerdon

The Dedham, Mass., store is the first Amazon Books on the East Coast.

There are five Amazon Books stores currently open.

The Paramus store is expected to open in late spring or early summer.

Amazon Books stores don't accept cash, but you can pay by Amazon app, or credit card.

The new bookstore at Legacy Place mall in Dedham, Mass., looks like other bookstores, with rows and rows of novels, a coffee bar, and browsing customers. But the main purpose of the store isn’t to sell books. It’s selling a brand called Amazon.

The store in Dedham, which opened six weeks ago, is the first Amazon Books store to open on the East Coast. It offers a preview of what shoppers can expect when the first Amazon Books in New Jersey opens in Paramus in about two months.

Amazon, which used books to build its e-commerce empire — and to convince shoppers to buy online and avoid a trip to the local bookstore — is now opening its own version of a local bookstore.

Like the Dedham store, the Paramus location won’t take cash, and there will be no prices on the merchandise (if you want to check the price, there’s an app for that). Amazon’s Echo, Dot, Kindle and Fire TV electronic devices and its Amazon Prime video rentals will be given star status, with prominent displays.

It is also expected to draw crowds of the curious when it opens. The Dedham store, in a popular mall, was packed on a recent Saturday. Most visitors, however, browsed the book racks, looked at the electronics displays and left without buying.

And that is OK with Amazon, according to Mike Elgan, a contributing columnist for Computerworld, who, when Amazon first began opening brick-and-mortar stores, wrote that what Amazon really is selling “is the impulse to buy everything from Amazon.”

When Amazon sells a device like the Echo, which has a virtual assistant that can answer questions or place orders for Amazon products, according to Elgan, “it sells a lifetime of easy ordering of everything from Amazon.”

At the Dedham store, employees seemed more interested in recommending that store visitors download the Amazon shopping app on their phones than in pushing bestsellers. The app lets shoppers check prices by scanning the merchandise and also makes it easier to instantly order Amazon products at any time with a few taps on a smartphone.

Amazon officials have revealed little information about the Paramus store, other than its location. The store is under construction at Westfield Garden State Plaza, the state’s largest mall. It will occupy a prime 4,500-square-foot space that formerly housed the Converse store.

It is expected to open in late spring or early summer, Amazon spokeswoman Deborah Bass said in an email to The Record. The Paramus store, she said, will differ from Dedham in that it won’t have a coffee shop.

Customers in the stores can pay for merchandise with their Amazon accounts or credit cards. Cash isn’t accepted. Amazon Prime members will pay the same price as online; non-members will pay full list price, usually 10 to 30 percent more than the Amazon Prime price.

Selling books isn’t new for Amazon. When the company was born as an online retailer in 1994, it sold only books. But Amazon selling books in a physical store is very new. It opened its first bookstore, in Seattle, at the end of 2015. It now has five stores, with seven more, including Paramus and two in Manhattan, expected to open over the next 12 months.

With books the initial product Amazon used to build the country’s largest e-commerce empire, some analysts have wondered if books will be the basis for a new Amazon empire of brick-and-mortar stores that could threaten all retailers, not just booksellers.

Ken Madden, head of engagement for Dallas-based marketing firm Shoptology, believes Amazon is interested in actually selling books in its new stores, and not just boosting its brand. After a long period when book sales shifted to online, that growth has stalled in recent years, he said. "We've reached a point where two-thirds of shoppers prefer to buy online and one-third in store, and that number is not really changing any more," Madden said. If Amazon wants to reach the one-third of in-store shoppers, it needs physical stores, he said.

"People want to engage about what they're reading," he said. Reading online reviews "isn't as engaging as having a passionate discussion with somebody face to face. It's just not the same," Madden said.

Amazon is putting its bookstores "either where there's tremendous foot traffic or high visibility," Madden said, such as Garden State Plaza or the planned location in Manhattan near the Empire State Building.

Bookstores have been battling competition from Amazon for so long that they don’t expect the addition of an Amazon Books store to change their business.

“As far as I’m concerned there’s already an Amazon bookstore in everybody’s bedroom,” said Kenny Sarfin, owner of Books & Greetings, an independent bookstore in Northvale.

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Blue Bunny Books, a children's book store in Dedham, Mass., is pretty confident it can hold its own against the new competitor in town. "We have outstanding author events that are well attended," said store manager Margie Leonard. "We are a community gathering place with loyal customers who we love."

"Amazon has been a choice for customers for a long time," she said. "Our hope is that people will continue to return to, and love, the Blue Bunny because of the experience we provide."