The Company That I Have Decided To Research Is Barnes &

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 & 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.

The digital books business eliminated the physical books in the store. Barnes & Noble offered a wide range digital platforms to its customers. The digital system was comparable with Window 8 personal computer and tablets. It also worked well with Apple’s product such as iPad, iPhone and other products like Android smartphones and tablets. The firm continued to stay in a competitive advantage position in the marketplace, even though it had to compete with many powerhouses in the same industry such as Waldenbooks and Crown Books. And yet, Barnes & Noble remains on the top of the leading U.S bookstore chains.

Based on the initial sales of the Kindle Fire, it is recommended that Amazon move forward in positioning with Apple’s iPad and targeting its consumer segment to “media junkies”. An extensive financial analysis was then conducted to have found that a pricing strategy at

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

demand of the product.The Kindle line has shown wild success, Bezos will once again try to

Later, the launch of the updated Kindle Fire combined an e-book reader, music player, video player, and internet browser into one convenient, compact tablet. Although the Kindle Fire's selling price of $199 did not seem to cover the costs at first, Bezos was still confident in it. (Anders, “Jeff Bezos Gets It” 2012) The reason for this confidence was because he knew that he was selling customer's another way to get to Amazon.com, and now many purchases are made on Amazon through tablets and mobile devices.

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

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.

Prior to the Kindle’s release, Amazon convinced publishers to digitize their offerings for its new e-reader. They succeeded in convincing all of the “Big Six” publishers to rapidly accelerate their e-book development and to offer their content through the Amazon e-bookstore. Also, people already had subscriptions to Amazon Prime and were very loyal to make their purchases through Amazon. Plus Amazon’s apps work on all devices while the same is not true for other e-readers and tablets.

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.

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

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.

With a focus on technology to separate itself from its competitors, Amazon developed a portable reading device to meet consumer demand. The kindle has been very successful consumer tablet with an easy to read liquid crystal display and an intuitive user interface. In 2009 the Kindle was made available to cost consumers at $300 USD, at the time this was a large sum of money for a new device with basic features. The product though, was well built, ergonomic, and aesthetically pleasing. The product had adequately addressed consumer’s desire for a portable reading device that could store multiple volumes of work in a small profile. Kindle’s primary competition at the time was the Barnes & Noble’s “Nook” e-reader and Apple’s “iPad.” Currently, other competitors have entered the space with devices by Samsung, Google, and Asus. These competitors are also linked to various wireless services that power the data functionality of these devices.

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