High Street Retailers And Online Sellers - 1389 Words

Introduction Books, a source of entertainment, education and interest, have been around for hundreds if not thousands of years. Books are widely used at schools, in the workplace and at home, but the recent information age has the taken the world by storm, with the introduction of tablets, e-books and kindles which all provide a convenient use of ‘books’. People’s change in lifestyle and tastes comes with a craze over technology, which begs the question that; are hard copy books that are sold in high street retailers at risk of being extinguished by online resources of books? Or will the long-standing book hold too much sentimental and historical value? This report aims to identify and discuss upon whether High Street retailers and online†¦show more content†¦This has an effect on the increase growth of online sales of books; for example, as the price of books is expensive in the high street, such as WHSmith; customers will switch to online purchase, such as, Amazon. Moreover, the changing in technology also encouraging consumers to switch from traditional printed books sold in high street book stores to e-books sold online. For example, this has been supported by the BBC website which suggests that ‘the total number of printed books sold dropped even further- falling 9.8% to 186.9 million.’ This implies that the continued growth of the digital e-books market sold online has serious impact/responsible for the large decrease in high street book sales. (BBC, 2014) Consumers take price consideration, such as, price elasticity of demand on books. Books are often viewed as price elastic. As the price of the books decreases or it has better offer in online sales, consumer will switch to purchase it online rather than high street. This causes a rise in quantity demanded for online purchase of books and decrease purchase of books from the high street book stores. For example, customers can compare price of the books between the online book stores provided by different sellers, which it creates even high competition for high street book store to compete with online book stores. As high street book stores cannot