Amazon opens brick-and-mortar bookstore in Paramus

Online retail giant Amazon has opened a brick-and-mortar bookstore in Paramus.

The items inside the store don’t have price tags. Customers will need to use a scanner or the Amazon app to find out how much the books cost. Cash payments also aren’t accepted; only a smartphone app or credit card.

All the books sold in the store have an online rating of four stars and above.

“I kind of like this.  I'm a fan of this,” says customer Quinn Croland. “If I see there's a five-star book, I'll see what it's about."

The shop is located inside the Westfield Garden State Plaza Mall close to where the Borders bookstore used to be. Borders shut down largely due to Amazon’s success.

It was the mega-bookstore chains like Borders and Barnes and Noble that caused many independent bookstores to close down. But shop owner Jim Morgan opened up an independent bookstore, The Curious Reader, in Glen Rock four years ago.

The store works with schools to match the reading curriculums, and Morgan says he and his daughter give the type of catered services a large chain cannot.

"Identifying a new book, a young adult book, a middle grade book or some book that's coming out, which has some special characteristics and [my daughter] knows the audience and she'll talk to parents and hook up the kids with the right books,” Morgan says.

The Paramus Amazon store is only one of eight Amazon bookstores nationwide.