Barnes & Noble

In contrast to Borders Group, Barnes & Noble which is a leading bookstore in the US recorded an 11% increase in their share value in the past year with the introduction of their e-book reader “Nook”. It is clear that Barnes & Noble were not “Myopic” in their approach and were able to retain and even grow their customers as well as profits by embracing a new product.

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.

Identify landmarks or other details to orient your customer to the environment around him or her

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.

They take the constructive feedback they receive from customers and apply it to future enhancements. A unique feature is, they hand-pick their books; these books consists of Canadian small presses, national publishers, and international imprints as they echo the diversity of their customer’s interests (BryanPrinceBookseller, 2015). One of the main reasons why this bookstore has been so successful is because of the passion held within the business. The owners are all enthusiastic readers and highly value the art and heritage behind literature. In addition they are always happy to discuss what they are currently reading and are capable of making

According to the Miles and Snow strategy typology, there are four basic organizational or strategic types; prospector, defender, analyzer, and reactor (Parnell, 2014). The prospectors tend to be creators of change in the industry. Defenders do not search for new opportunities outside their normal narrow product-market domain. Analyzers are flexible and are mixture of both prospectors and defenders. Reactors are not consistent, and do not respond to environmental pressures well (McDaniel & Kolari, 1987). Dollar Tree would be categorized under the defender strategy. They have a narrow product-market domain, and do not search for new opportunities. Dollar Tree did not introduce any new products or services first as Dollar General opened its first

Before Waverlys were published in the United States, publishing in America was mainly just newspapers, almanacs, and pamphlets and relied on Britain to send them anything fiction. However, as tariffs rose publishers decided that they would make more money by importing one copy of a British book and then reprinting in the United States. This shift in publishing changed the game of the publishing world. Publishers didn’t have one job anymore; they were now wholesalers and distributors for the books they published by themselves. Now they didn’t just have a local market, they had a national market.

My first transaction was on January 25, 2016 at the Buffalo State Barnes & Noble Book Store. This transaction was to buy a book for class. The Buffalo state book store has a wide range of merchandise, including textbook rental, new, used, and digital textbooks; trade books; special-order books; emblematic clothing; art, school, and office supplies; greeting cards; gifts; and computer supplies. Although it is very convenient their prices for their items are relatively high, and for that reason I did not purchase the book from the school store. The sales representative I worked with was a student at Buffalo State College. I did make a purchase at the end of the encounter.

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

Barnes & Noble's beginnings can be traced to 1873, when Charles M. Barnes started a book business from his home in Wheaton, Illinois. In 1917, his son, William, went to New York to join G. Clifford Noble in establishing Barnes & Noble. During the height of the Great Depression, what later became the Barnes & Noble flagship store was opened on Fifth Avenue at 18th Street in New York City. This store developed a worldwide reputation for excellence by serving millions of customers with its comprehensive selection of general trade books, academic titles and textbooks, and medical books. Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE:BKS) is a Fortune 500 company, the nation’s largest retail bookseller and a leading retailer of content, digital media and educational

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.

Amazon has the power to discriminate prices based on the consumer or just raise prices to make up for their losses. Khan states that people do not understand how pricing and online markets work and that the government has missed out on the “anticompetitive implications of Amazon’s below-cost pricing”. The main story and problem Khan refers to in the Yale Law Journal is Amazon’s monopoly over e-books. Khan mentioned many ways Amazon can manipulate the e-book market to their liking. Authors recently wrote an article to the Department of Justice saying Amazon has “extract[ed] vital resources from the [book] industry in ways that lessen the diversity and quality of books” and this is not benefitting consumers (Khan).

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

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