Twenty years after its debut online, retail giant Amazon.com opens its first physical storefront, Amazon Books. On Tuesday morning, the bookstore welcomed its first customers at University Village in Seattle.

Huffington Post quoted Jennifer Cast, the company's vice-president, saying that "Amazon books is a physical extension of Amazon.com". Located in a shopping center near the University of Washington, it occupies 5,500 square feet of retail space. It includes 2,000 square feet of storage with hardwood floors and wooden shelves stocked with 5,000 to 6,000 titles. The children's books section is carpeted and has comfy chairs - designed to provide the look and feel of a traditional bookstore.

The brick-and-mortar bookstore has unique selling points. Instead of organizing the books in the shelves on its spine, all of the books in the store are presented on its front cover. This gives priority to quality rather than quantity by showcasing authors and their works instead of filling the shelves with as many books as they can hold.

Underneath each type of book is a review card that shows the book's Amazon.com customer rating, plus a description or an assessment of the book by an Amazon.com user.

Aside from the typical best-sellers and Amazon.com favorites sections, some sections have titles like "Award Winners", "Gifts for Young Adults", and "Staff Favorites", with feature books that would change regularly.

The way the books are organized serves as a solution to one of the notorious problems most physical bookstores are faced with: books that gather dust, remain unsold, and eventually returned to their respective publishers.

Book prices in the physical store will remain the same as the prices on the website. There is also a section where customers can try out trademark Amazon gadgets like the Kindle and Fire tablets, and Fire streaming media player.

Amazon chose Seattle as a location for its pioneer storefront because the city is a top market for readers, and it's near the company's headquarters.

According to the Seattle Times, Cast says that the Amazon Books storefront is a culmination of two decades of online book selling experience. It combines the advantages that offline and online book selling has to offer. Their goal is to continuously "do a great job of selling books".

By taking the data they have on Amazon.com like user ratings, reviews, and sales, which immediately inform them of customers' reading preferences and buying habits, they can effectively choose to sell titles that appeal to various customers. It is this "data with heart" that makes the Amazon Books store stand out from its competitors.