Article written by Techicated, technology news and resources

The online shopping giant recently revealed that they will be opening between 300 to 400 physical book stores across the country. While there was no official announcement, this move was widely expected given the recent trial bookstore opened.

Amazon will use the data gathered from all book sales online to determine the catalog of books available at each store. Each section will be stocked with titles based on specific category sales data. They will also take is a step further and use data gathered for sales within those geographic areas to narrow down the most popular titles. In addition they will also stock books favored by influencers. It is not yet clear who these are but Jeff Bezos himself will be recommending certain titles.

There are two advantages for Amazon with this approach. The first, now that they have dominated online book sales, is to get a larger share of the sales from physical stores. There are still several large bookstore chains that Amazon will target with these launches. The other is that thanks to the large data set they can also limit the number of books they will need to stock at each store.

The rumor is that these bookstores will also be used as last mile delivery hubs to get books to local customers quickly. Amazon recently ran trials of one hour delivery in certain cities and this is expected to tie in to their attempts to get products into their customers hands faster. For the moment Amazon will only be selling books at their stores. Which is also how they started online.