Amazon opened its first bookstore in its hometown of Seattle in 2015. (GeekWire Photo / Taylor Soper)

Amazon plans to open its first physical bookstore in New York City — and its sixth overall.

The store will be located in Time Warner Center on the edge of Central Park, and will open in 2017, an Amazon spokeswoman said in an email.

The Wall Street Journal first reported on the new store and added that Amazon is looking at a second New York location in the Hudson Yards area.

Amazon, which got its start selling books online, opened its first physical bookstore in Seattle in 2015 amid secrecy and anticipation. It has also opened stores in Portland and San Diego, with plans in the works for locations in Chicago and the Boston suburb of Dedham.

Amazon’s bookstore in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Taylor Soper)

In an interview with GeekWire in 2015, just before Amazon opened its first location in Seattle, Amazon Books’ head Jennifer Cast hinted that more stores might be on the way.

“We hope that if this goes well, if customers love it, we’d love to do it in other places,” Cast said.

Amazon bookstores take a slightly different approach to retail. All book titles face outward, making it easy for customers to browse. Also, none of the books have price tags. Instead, customers wave the bar code on the book under a scanner in order to determine the price, though only Prime members get the discounted prices that books sell for on Amazon.com.

The store in Seattle, which spans 7,400 square feet and includes about 5,000 books, also showcases a healthy slate of Amazon devices, including the popular Kindle e-readers.

Bookstores are only one part of a multi-pronged brick-and-mortar push for Amazon, which spent its first 20 years helping define and dominating the online retail world. The company also has pop-up shops in malls around the country, and it is building and testing multiple grocery models, including drive-up stores and the Amazon Go convenience store concept.

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