High Street Retailers And Online Sellers

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.

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

In this case, the traditional bookseller’s niche is overlapped the Big box retailers’. Because of the limited resources: only certain amount of people demand for popular books, they have to compete for the market of popular books. However, scale difference generates selection pressures. Obviously traditional booksellers have smaller scale and less purchasing power to compete with “Big box” retailers. When the electronic books came out, traditional booksellers struggle more. Although all booksellers were affected, “Big box”

Books used to be a hard copied deed with words handwritten by ink pen, owned by the rich until the advent of the first printing press, enabling many to own multiple copies of this so called books. This also allowed affordable access to information and education for most. As time passed on, words began to show up on electronic devices allowing all to own at least one copy of a book "that's ever been written"; at least until it just "vanishes". Some may see this great technology as the greatest asset of the world, however, others may believe such things are wrong and not the conventional way of doing things. The contentious issue of eBooks replacing the traditional hard copied

Brenner states in his article, “No Borders”, how “bookstores are victims of changing times, technologies, and economics.” In the literary, economic world, there had been two national bookstores that competed in the nation, Borders and Barnes & Noble. Sadly Borders, Barnes & Noble’s largest competitor, went bankrupt and was forced to close, due to the national recession being at its highest in 2010. Since then it has become more and more difficult for bookstores to even make it since for, “You can surf the web for a book on Amazon and probably get a better deal” (Brenner, 81). Despite this, Barnes & Noble has successfully survived in the dying literature market and has become, “One of the largest booksellers in the US” ("Barnes & Noble, Inc. SWOT Analysis", 3). Booksellers around the world are becoming rarer in our technological advance society, as these shops seem to die out

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

The article describes how brick and mortar stores are faced with problem of show-rooming. This problem is where consumers come into retail stores and try out or on products and then go online and purchase at a lower price (Zimmerman, 2012). Target was trying to get their vendors to give them exclusive products to sell only in their brick and mortar stores. Other options were for the vendor to offer better prices to Target than to its competitors.

Price Elasticity of Demand is the theory of elasticity that focuses on the relationship between the price and the demand for a good or service. The study of how sensitive consumers are to a price change, is the study of Price Elasticity of Demand (Anderson). The idea is that when there is a change in the price of a good or service the demand will also change. In order to predict consumer behavior suppliers will study the consumer’s responsiveness to price change. Price Elasticity of Demand is measured by a difference in percent changes. The difference between the percent change in demand and the percent change in price (Anderson). If there is a larger respond in the amount demanded due to the price change the good or

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.

The advent of e-books, coupled with the rapid decline in brick-and-mortar bookstores, has left an increasing number of people pondering the possibility of actual physical books going the way of the dinosaur. As an avid audiobook “reader,” I wanted to see for myself whether or not the Digital Revolution has truly swept traditional bookstores aside, leaving publishers trembling in fear. For this reason, I chose the recently-opened Barnes & Noble bookstore at The Fountains at Farrah shopping center the research hub for my observation project.

Mystery novels are elastic demand than required textbooks. If the price of required textbooks rose, students would have little choice but to pay the higher price. You can substitute a mystery novel, while required textbooks are a necessity with no close substitutes. If mystery novels price rise, readers would substitute other types of novels, or choose not to purchase at all. Quantity demanded of required textbooks is less responsive to price than the quantity demanded of mystery novels.

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. ...

Textbook prices have been on the rise since the late 1970s. A book that would have cost 25 dollars in 1978 had risen in cost to 208 dollars in 2013, an increase of 812 percent (Follett 1), and with an 82 percent increase between the years of 2002 and 2013 (Sennack 6). This is a higher increase in the price percentage wise than medical care, housing, and even the consumer

Will Bury's e-publishing invention that can produce both digital text and understandable digitally-read text quickly from published books has the potential to completely disrupt digital publishing, digital recording and a wide spectrum of other training-related industries. His early efforts at selling the recordings and downloadable book files online have been disappointing, showing an apparent lack of price elasticity in the market. One of the fundamental shortcomings of his pricing strategies is their lack of agility as it relates to a value-based pricing strategy. Will needs to realize that the content of the books and their reputation for scarcity versus ubiquity has a direct effect on their price elasticity curves (Xu, 2007). Will needs to also do a significantly greater level of experimentation with pricing to determine how the customers he is attracting to his website view the recordings from a value, substitution pricing theory, and scarcity versus ubiquity standpoint. Static pricing for digitally-enabled and distributed goods often fails to capture the nuances in product demand including an accurate assessment of the demand curve (Clay, Smith, Wolff, 2006). These are foundational elements of any pricing elasticity study, and Will has just a small proportion of the data he needs to define an optimal pricing strategy for the digitally enabled books and recordings. The following section provides an analysis of key questions

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.