Writer Allison Stieger has been hailed as the first person ever to “reverse showroom” Amazon, after she browsed for a book in the online giant’s new Seattle bookshop before buying it from a local independent bookseller.
Amazon.com opened its first physical bookstore last week, stocking around 5,000 titles in a Seattle shop and selling them for the same price as on its website. With a nod to Amazon’s encouragement of showrooming – the practice of browsing in a physical store and then purchasing a product online – Seattle Review of Books co-founder Paul Constant followed the news with a tweet promising a “reward for the first person who takes a photo of themselves buying from an indie bookstore on their phone while standing in an Amazon Books”.
Stieger, a novelist and “mythologist”, took him at his word, tweeting Constant an image of Alice Hoffman’s novel The Marriage of Opposites on the shelf at Amazon Books, before buying the book online from Seattle independent Queen Anne Book Company.
She received a gift certificate for $75 (£50), and Constant wrote in the Seattle Review of Books that “we made history today”.
“Allison Stieger became the first person in the world to reverse-showroom Amazon Books, and she bought the world’s first reverse-showroomed book at Queen Anne Book Company,” he wrote. “Congratulations, Allison Stieger and Queen Anne Book Company! You’ve showroomed the showroomer.”
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