The New Republic – “Amazon is as dominant as ever—and its retail ambitions aren’t going anywhere. But booksellers can toast the end of its disastrous foray into their turf. America’s worst bookstore chain is no more. On Wednesday, Amazon announced it would be closing all 68 of its brick-and-mortar bookstores, as well as its “4-Star” stores, which sold a hodgepodge of products that had received decent reviews on its main website. The bookstores had expanded rapidly after Amazon opened a first location in Seattle in the fall of 2015, but growth slowed during the Covid-19 pandemic. Now the chain has said that it’s refocusing its physical retail efforts into a planned expansion into clothing and department stores. “We remain committed to building great, long-term physical retail experiences and technologies, and we’re working closely with our affected employees to help them find new roles within Amazon,” company spokesperson Betsy Harden said in a statement. Amazon Books was always awkwardly situated between the company’s pitiless approach to commerce—its all-consuming need to be a “disruptor” in everything that it does—and the necessities of old-fashioned retailing, particularly bookstores. It was also simultaneously a P.R. stunt—an attempt to put a human face on the grim smiley face that adorns the company’s boxes—and a weird experiment, an attempt to use physical retail stores to mine data about how customers shop in person. No one ever asked for it, the strategy never worked particularly well, and now the company is doing what it does with its many failed experiments: quickly washing its hands and moving on to the next attempt to gain market share.  When Amazon opened its first bookstore in New York City five years ago, Amazon Books chief Jennifer Cast insisted that the company’s fledgling book-and-mortar retail empire was a labor of love. “Books are our heart,” she said. “Jeff”—that would be Bezos, the company’s increasingly Lex Luthor-y founder—“loves books. Most of our company loves books, and so the mission of Amazon.com, the purpose was to help customers find, discover, and buy books online. And what we realized was that we had 20 years of data—about why customers buy, how they buy, what they read, how they read, and why they’re reading it—that could make a physical bookstore just a different and better place to discover books. So that’s what we wanted to do.”  It was a defensive answer but not a particularly surprising one. Most bookstore owners—even ones of small chains, and Amazon Books was, in 2017, just that, with only five locations—would hardly be expected to have to publicly proclaim that, yes, they had a real affection for literature. Bookselling is famously a low-margin business, one into which most proprietors enter out of passion. But Amazon Books was run by a company that had striven literally to transform the publishing industry to its will. Its ruthlessness was legendary. It squeezed publishers for vast discounts, sold books at a loss to drive out competitors, and treated the publishing industry writ large as a relic worth devouring. Bezos himself once instructed his staff to pursue publishers the way a hungry cheetah pursues a gazelle: “The cheetah looks for the weak, looks for the sick, looks for the small.” Yes, Jeff loves books, for what sounds suspiciously like dinner.