What Is The Difference Between Barnes And Noble

The bookstore chain has been decreasing in profit in the US over the past 20 years. Most of the books retailers are shutting down their operations and only a few are still operating in the country. Barnes and Noble has become the largest bookseller in the book retailers industry. The firm has integrated its business philosophy into web presence though eBook marketplace. This business strategy assisted the firm to be able to reach a large scale customers and remain as a strongest competitor in the book retailing market.

Barnes & Noble does business -- big business -- by the book. As the #1 bookseller in the US, it operates about 650 superstores throughout 49 states and the District of Columbia under the banners Barnes & Noble, Bookstop, and Bookstar, as well as about 200 mall stores using the names B. Dalton, Doubleday, and Scribner's. The company's GameStop subsidiary is the #1 US video game retailer with about 1,500 stores under the names Babbage's Etc., GameStop, and FuncoLand. Barnes & Noble owned about 75% of online book seller barnesandnoble.com after purchasing Bertelsmann's interest in 2003; Barnes & Noble then purchased all remaining shares and took the company private in May 2004.

As of January 2010, Amazon.com has three times the Internet sales revenue of the runner up, Staples. By offering a large amount of varied categories through its website and other international ones (Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.fr, and so on), it has managed to grow to a customer based company with over 30 million people. In addition, the online retail format enables the company to reduce costs of managing inventory (Amazon.com; online bookstore, 2008).

While value is a competitive advantage for Barnes and Noble’s retention of market share, their prices are not low enough to impose a low cost strategy.

Barnes and Noble Incorporated is currently the largest book and media-content retailer in the United States. Founded in 1873 in Wheaton, Illinois by Charles Montgomery Barnes, who had started it as a family business, it has since evolved into the biggest book marketplace of our time. Although Barnes and Noble has had a long-run of success, it is currently near the edge of bankruptcy. It’s lack of sales and the shift of interest in reading physical books has forced most book retailers to “close-up shop”, with Barnes and Noble being next on the list. Therefore, Barnes and Noble is not worth investing in, because of its loss

Barnes and Nobles is one of the biggest bookstores that has a brick-and-mortal store concept. In the past they were know as a “big bully” that drove small book stores to close down because of their aggressive tactics to have competetetive advantage over them. Nonetheless, with the evolving circle of technology they have had a hard time in keeping up with the E-book era. In 2014 E-books increased its reader subscription by 28% compared to 23% in 2013. This number will continue increasing because 50% off American’s have access to devices that are either an e-reader or a tablet. B&N changed its business model to adjust to this new setting before it suffered a

While the e-Books industry posed a serious threat to the retail books industry, Barnes and Noble jumped into a new market too soon and unprepared. In order to prove itself equal, Barnes and Noble has sacrificed its biggest advantage – physical bookstores which catered to book lovers’ impulsive need of selecting books from the shelves. The company launched its own dedicated e-reader device – Nook to get itself into the e-books game which cost them a heavy R&D investment especially when their core business has always been low tech. While the features offered in Nook are almost similar to Amazon’s kindle, it is still far behind the Kindle’s 60% market share.

Barnes & Noble are taking different tacks with regard to agreements with authors agents, and publishers. Amazon is pulling content off the market and padlocking it to their Kindle. In response, Barnes & Noble is refusing to stock Amazon published titles in its brick-and-mortar stores. Barnes & Nobles' investment in the well-received, well-reviewed Nook appears to have been a solid business decision, the ripples of which will continue to be felt for some time. In fact, the Nook is the proverbial finger in the dike as the waters of Amazon continue to threaten the very infrastructure of the publishing business by eroding the relationship between publishers and bricks-and-mortar stores.

Barnes & Noble is a well-respected name among book publishers and sellers. Prior to 1992, Barnes & Noble was a private firm. It printed, dispersed, and sold books in 68 Barnes & Noble superstores, over seven hundred B. Dalton bookstores, and other smaller bookstore chains that it attained. In 1992, to raise capital CEO Leonard Riggio decided sell stock in Barnes & Noble in an initial public offering. He wanted to use the money acquired to increase growth, reduce debt and achieve the greatest s expansion program in the bookstore business” (Cox, 1992).

Which in a way makes this location a leveler in our modern society. With a decent chair, plug, and a strong Wi-Fi signal this can make any bookstore able to survive in our technology focused society and there are many former “Third Places” that have failed due to not being able to accommodate this. Barnes & Noble still has its troubles though, for not only with competition like Amazon and Wal-Mart, but the ever “growing competition on the basis of price and technology upgrades in the books industry” ("Barnes & Noble, Inc. SWOT Analysis", 8) continue to cause hindrance for the company. Despite this the company has been making the necessary changes to keep the store afloat in our ever evolving society. For, “In 2009, Barnes & Noble launched one of the world's largest eBookstores and digital newsstands” ("Barnes & Noble, Inc. SWOT Analysis", 4). Which successfully helped save Barnes & Noble unlike its predecessor,

However, Amazon compete with them very well. Also, due to wide variety of products, their competitors ranges from retailers, merchandise retailers, online internet retailers,etc. In the late 1990's it provide competition to the bookselling industry and forced Barnes & Noble to launch their online website. Barnes and Noble offers books, DVDs, and CDs, which directly competes with Amazon.com's media segment. Amazon.com competes against all competitors on selection, convenience, and customer experience as well as price. Barnes & Noble had not been successful in online business and they decided to partner with Amazon.com

Barnes & Noble, Inc. operates as a content, commerce, and technology company in the United States. It provides access to books, magazines, newspapers, and other content through its multi-channel distribution platform. The company sells its products directly to customers through its bookstores and on barnesandnoble.com. Barnes & Noble conducts its online business through Barnes & Noble.com, one of the Web’s largest e-commerce sites, which also features more than 3 million titles in its eBookstore.  Through Barnes & Noble’s NOOK eReading product offering, customers can buy and read eBooks on the widest range of platforms, including NOOK eBook

Nick Wingfield writes that Amazon can improve physical retail through their “data-centric approach to online retailing” (Alter, A. and Wingfield, N., 2016). Amazon’s first brick-and-mortar store differs from traditional independent bookstores. Amazon has forsaken the “charm of a funky used bookstore” in favour of a “clean…well-lit and corporate” atmosphere (Alter, A. and Wingfield, N., 2016). The store is small and has a limited selection of 5,000 books, “a tiny percentage of what most independent booksellers would carry” (Vuong, 2016). All titles are face-out (rather than spine-out) and each carries “a review card with the Amazon.com customer rating and a review” (Amazon, 2016).

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (B&N) is a Fortune 500 company, the world’s largest bookseller and the nation’s highest-rated bookselling brand. In the early 1960s, Leonard Roggio acquired a traditional bookstore owned by Charles Barnes in New York and transformed it into the biggest bookstore in the U.S. today. The company is currently made up of three segments - retail, college bookstore and e-reader. According to B&N.com, the company runs approximately 1,300 bookstores, including 605 retail bookstores in 50 states along with more than 700 B&N College bookstores (B&N, 2014). As a result of the dramatic changes in the retail bookselling industry, Barnes & Noble has shifted from a traditional brick-and-mortar bookstore to a multi-channel retailer. The company has established an online channel through BN.com offering more than one million book titles. Between its retail stores and online operations, Barnes & Noble sells around 200 million physical books per year. In addition, B&N launched NOOK, a brand of e-reading products designed to give the company a substantial foothold in the e-book market as well as NOOK store, an expansive database of over four million digital books.

Amazon is a company that sells many open product categories online by allowing customers to take the time to search and shop through the product offerings. Many product categories that are offered on Amazon may include device accessories, kindle devices, beauty, books, electronics, health & personal care, etc. The foremost product category that can offer the greatest advantage compared with a retail store chain is most definitely the books category. Reason to this is that the company has expanded the customer’s online shopping experience by offering such a wide range of physical and electronic books, depending on the preference of the customers. They are able to search for the top-rated selling