Bookoff, Amazon Japan, and the Japanese Retail Bookselling Industry

While we are in demand of textbooks for our courses, the closest option for us with the greatest supply just so happens to be the bookstore

Considering with the economic downturn, Barnes & Noble has found the way to offer price discount to all its customers specially price seekers. Since Barnes & Noble was a leading bookstore, it attracted many suppliers and publishers. Barnes & Noble was taking advantage of the situation where it had the ability to access a large customer base to arrange a better price deal from publishers and suppliers. Since it had a power of negotiate the price, it would add more value and strength to its business. The company was able to offer up to 30% off on the actual price from the publishers for hardcover bestsellers and 20% for all children books. In addition, Barnes & Noble offered discount program to its members. All members can receive extra 10% additional on top of 30% to hardcover bestsellers only if they agree to pay a $25 membership fee per year.

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.

Inventory is the biggest investment of the business and the performance of the inventory can determine whether the store succeeds or fails. We have chosen a different supply strategy as a method to save on cost. This method will require our publishers to ship books directly to the store which will save on our shipping expenses.

When I walked into Barnes & Noble, it gave me a home-like environment. Their shelves hold 20 to 200 thousand titles of books. Groups of couches and chairs are placed throughout the store to sit in while reading books and magazines. I feel like they wanted to give the store a home feeling as if you were just sitting in your own home reading a book. I know when I started to walk around the store it made me feel like I was at home. As I started to look around at books, I noticed a couch. I went and sat down for a bit, overviewing the book. Another feature I noticed about the store was people on their Nook. They have Wi-Fi to browse the internet for books to add to their Nook.

Three key challenges facing the Canadian book publishing industry are the concentration in retail market, the competition for multinationals, and the cost of adapting to new technologies and entering the export market. Policy source 14, Summative Evaluation of the Book Publishing Industry Development Industry Program discusses these challenges.

However, Amazon.com made this chain or supply useless. At amazon.com, unlike traditional bookstores, there are no bookshelves to browse. All contact with the costomer is either through its web site or by email. At the firm’s web site, customers can search for a specific book, topic and etc. Customers can browse, fill up a virtual shopping basket, and then complete the sale by

Some of the retail bookstores fail to appreciate the significant thereat threat that digital book publishing continues to pose.

2-B&N and the book publishers are changing their business models to deal with the Internet and e-book technology by B&N developing its own e-readable devised called Nook. In order to meet demand and supply, they started to be actively in control of its supply chain by developing,

The book market is in fact growing ‘with the exception of weak fortnights in both March and April, sales figures for the overall book market have shown sustained growth in 2005. ...

Government has introduced some policies to protect the publishing industry. According to National Book Policy which adopted in 1985, it proposed that the book industry should be recognized as an essential industry and, therefore, support must be given for its development. Moreover, the Government policy towards local printing and publishing industry was meant to give ‘protection’ to the industry.

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, 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

The seller of digital textbooks will also be saving money over producing hard copies. 32% of the cost allocated to paper, printing and editorial can be completely eliminated along with 22.4% of costs related to bookstore operations and personnel. Bookstores as we know them could become obsolete or transformed into stores that sell tablets, e-readers and software packages on campus. Publishers or sellers will now be able to tap into a more global market with electronic textbooks as the information can be translated into many languages quickly.

The second option involves entering the book production business. But, its potential is unlimited. Here we are dealing with huge market consisting significant figures of 50,000 new titles and 1,500,000 repeat titles a year. Moreover, the market for on demand and short run books is extended beyond the life cycle of normal book. This makes market interesting in terms of extent it can expand to.