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Powell's NW 10th & Burnside entrance
Powell's NW 10th & Burnside entrance

Powell's Books is a chain of bookstores in the Portland metropolitan area. Powell's headquarters, dubbed Powell's City of Books, claims to be the largest independent new and used bookstore in the world.[1] Powell's City of Books is located in the Pearl District on the edge of downtown, and occupies a full city block, between NW 10th and 11th Avenues and between W Burnside and NW Couch Streets. It contains over 68,000 ft² (6,300 m² or about 1.6 acres) of retail floor space.

The inventory for its retail and online sales is over four million new, used, rare, and out-of-print books.[2] Since 2005, its website has also offered DVDs with free shipping, with an inventory of over 40,000. At its retail stores it shelves all new and used books side-by-side. Powell's buys around 3000 used books a day.[1]

Powell's has an Internet presence which began in 1993 as email and FTP-based access to its technical bookstore; it has since expanded to incorporate fiction and other genres as a traditional ecommerce site.[3] Their website was established in 1994, before Amazon.com, and has contributed substantially to the chain's recent growth.[4]

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