On The Media- Amazon Shifting Times

Barnes & Noble used to be the go-to place to find any book from any genre. From the new Harry Potter, to another Stephen King novel, Barnes & Noble was the Disneyland for bookworms.


Borders, the used-to-be rival of booksellers to Barnes & Noble, went out of business in 2011.


From about 2009-2014, Amazon ate these companies for breakfast with their e-book. Readers everywhere were switching to handheld devices-styled reading, making it convenient to continuously blow through books at the online hand. In April, 2014, Forbes estimated that Amazon e-books were bringing in $265-$530 million a year (Forbes, 2014). Around 13 million Amazon Kindles were being sold every years since 2007 (Forbes, 2014). The reason the Kindles are so popular is because an e-book is typically much cheaper than its hard copy- anywhere from $4 for an e-book and $20 for the hard copy. For a frequent reader, it's no wonder the Kindle was so popular.


Barnes & Noble has tried to keep up to date with the market demand for handheld devices and the e-book system when they released their own version, the Nook, which did not hail in comparison to the sales of the Kindle. It's been a flop so far, and CNN Money reports sales of the Nook have plummeted 32% since 2014 (CNN, 2015). Barnes & Noble has closed many of their stores in hopes to maintain business through keeping up with online changes. The company has lost several CEO's in the last few years as well.


While Amazon is sitting well with their e-readers, as they are in complete control of the market, there has been recent buzz about what the future holds for the company, and the entire market of books. Amazon is beginning to open stores that sell books by the hard copy. They have shifted back to the ways of the mid-2000's before the release of e-readers. Why?


They have already taken out it's wholesale rivals, Barnes & Noble and Borders. The fact of the matter is, Amazon is hot, Amazon is popular, and everyone loves them. Their book industry is just a small feature of them, and they happen to control the market of it. So the real question is- why not? While Barnes & Noble may be seeing a Borders-like ending to their business run, they will at least be able to hold on a little while longer. They may not be able to compete with Amazon in the e-reader market, but Barnes & Noble will always be the ground-breaking innovator of wholesale hard-copy books.


Nonetheless, the ball is in Amazon's court.




To read more, check out:


http://money.cnn.com/2015/12/04/investing/barnes-and-noble-sales-nook-amazon/


http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2014/04/02/estimating-kindle-e-book-sales-for-amazon/#60f51c95bfcd