Independent bookstore fan showrooms Amazon Books

When the news about Amazon Books was first announced, I tweeted this out:

If you were unaware, Amazon has actively promoted "showrooming," which is the act of standing in a brick-and-mortar bookstore, looking at a book, and then buying it on Amazon, rather than from the bookstore. You're using the bookstore as a showroom for Amazon, but the bookstore, which pays rent and salaries and all the other expenses of running a small business, gets absolutely nothing. BuzzFeed picked up my above tweet and ran it as part of a listicle about Amazon Books. My issue with BuzzFeed's listicle was that they included my tweet as a "joke." I was dead serious. So this morning, the good people at Shelf Awareness gave my tweet a signal boost and I clarified that I absolutely meant what I said:

It didn't take long for someone to bite. Twitter user Allison Stieger visited Amazon Books this afternoon. She found a book that she was interested in — Alice Hoffman's The Marriage of Opposites:

And then she bought it from the website of awesome local bookseller Queen Anne Book Company.

And then she picked it up at QABC:

So there you have it! 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. Congratulations, Allison Stieger and Queen Anne Book Company! You've showroomed the showroomer. And Elliott Bay Book Company thanks you for it: