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Amazon Plans To Open Hundreds Of Physical Bookstores, Says Mall CEO
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The biggest bookseller in the world might be about to get quite a bit bigger — IRL.
Amazon, the retail behemoth, plans to open hundreds of brick and mortar bookstores, according to the CEO of a large mall ownership and operation group.
"Even Amazon [is] opening bricks-and-mortar bookstores, and their goal is to open, as I understand, 300 to 400 bookstores," Sandeep Mathrani, CEO of General Growth Properties, said Tuesday during an earnings call.
That number would instantly make Amazon — which has changed the nature of bookselling over the past two decades — one of the country's biggest such chains, though it would have fewer than Barnes & Noble's 640 stores.
In November, Amazon opened its first physical store, in the company's hometown of Seattle. And the company has been selling its Kindle readers in electronics stores for years. Should Mathrani's claim prove accurate, this effort would be, by far, Amazon's biggest foray into physical retail.
Amazon declined comment; General Growth Properties has not yet responded to a request for comment.
You Will Never Be Able To Unsee Donald Trump As Dolores Umbridge
Sorry.
Remember Dolores Umbridge? The cat-loving villain from the Harry Potter series?
I mean, really, how could you forget?
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And you know Donald Trump, 2016 republican presidential candidate?
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JUST LOOK AT IT. LOOK AT THE TRUMPBRIDGE.
23 Things You Only Understand If "Harry Potter" Fans Are Your People
Mischief management requires a squad.
There's that crucial, charged moment after someone asks if you're into Harry Potter where you have to gauge how much they're really ready for.
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And you know exactly the questions to ask to figure out just how compatible your fandoms are.
"So...how do you feel about Snape's relationship to Lily Evans?"
Once they've passed the test, you go from lone obsessed fan to beautiful fan community.
It's like sharing a hometown, but somehow deeper.
Someone Calculated How Much Wizard Money Is Worth In "Harry Potter"
So basically, now we know how much a wand actually costs at Ollivander’s.
As Harry Potter fans are well aware, wizards use a different form of currency from us Muggles.
It's a coin-based currency, consisting of three denominations: galleons, sickles, and knuts.
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Hagrid already explained the exchanges between denominations in the first book, but what we still didn't know is what these equal in Muggle money.
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UNTIL NOW. Industrious Reddit user aubieismyhomie went through the books and found out what things cost in galleons and sickles, then compared that to Muggle prices for similar objects.
For example, when Harry buys a bunch of candy off the train trolley in the first book, that costs 11 sickles and 7 knuts.
Other named prices in the books include:
A ride on the Knight Bus: 11 sickles
One hot chocolate: 2 sickles
A water bottle and toothbrush: 2 sickles
One Butterbeer: 2 sickles
Advanced Potion Making textbook: 9 galleons
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Using this, aubieismyhomie estimated how much wizard money would be compared to Muggle money.
"Based on this, a Butterbeer from the Hog's Head would be about $3 (as would hot chocolate on the Knight Bus), Harry bought about $18 of candy on the Hogwarts Express in his first year, and a high-level textbook costs about $175 (which Harry complained about how expensive it was)," the Reddit user wrote.
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42 Questions We Still Have About The Wizarding World
How do taxes work???
J.K. Rowling crafted a thoroughly beloved world with the Harry Potter series and all of its offshoots.
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But we still have some questions.
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1. What are wizard taxes like?
2. What's the deal with secondary school in the wizarding world? Are there just specialized vocational schools, or do they have general wizarding universities for those who want a higher education but don't know exactly what they want to do in life?
3. And is there any sort of process in place for magical folk who want to go to muggle universities?
4. Do wizards learn math at all outside of the (optional) arithmancy classes?
5. How do wizard currencies work for traveling wizards going country-to-country? For instance, what's the wizard currency like for kids at Uagadou?
6. Some wizard kids attend muggle schools until Hogwarts, but if that's the case, why are so many wizards still ignorant to muggle customs when there's that big cultural crossover?
7. How many students actually went to Hogwarts?
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