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When ecommerce was new and people were still afraid to give out their credit card information online, Amazon lured shoppers with the slogan “Earth’s biggest bookstore” and the promise of cheap books delivered to their doorsteps.

At the time, the book industry was busy ; a about Amazon’s early days was skeptical to say the least (“Earth’s Biggest Bookstore”? More like “Earth’s Smallest”).

But Amazon clawed its way to the top. When two-day delivery was too slow, Amazon in 2007 introduced its own Kindle ereaders and instantaneous downloads. By 2011, for the first time on Amazon. We to Borders shortly thereafter, while Barnes & Noble has been for over a decade.

Five years ago, it seemed that Amazon had succeeded in doing what tech companies set out to do: disrupt a traditional industry. What it didn’t expect was for readers to resist. Brick-and-mortar bookstores that remain have seen their at a pretty steady pace since 2015, while ebooks sales in the U.S. last year.

Despite Amazon’s success in tearing down retail, it’s found that it can’t change how people relate to books. People want to hold real books and flip through pages while surrounded by other readers. For as solitary as the act of reading can be, readers are a community.

Enter , which opened yesterday in Manhattan’s glossy Time Warner Center. But as shiny a temple to capitalism as it is, Amazon should look north and east. There is no shortage of bookstores in Manhattan, but Queens — New York’s largest and most ethnically diverse borough — has just one bookstore, the excellent but very small . And the Bronx lost its last bookstore, a Barnes & Noble, a few months ago.

Community organizers are stepping in; just reached its goal of securing space and funding for a store, and is trying to do the same thing in the Bronx. As a strong believer in independent bookstores, I want these and other initiatives to succeed. Yet as a person whose life was formed by a love of reading, I want there to be as many bookstores as possible — and that means corporate bookstore alongside community ones.

If Amazon wants to do what is best for itself, it will also do what’s best for readers and open bookstores in the poor and working-class areas that have been let without them.