Copperfield

For the past twenty five years, your company Copperfield's bookstore has earned the reputation for being Sonoma Country's hometown bookstore. Providing the local community with new, used and rare books in your six locations spread across the Sonoma and Napa counties. Your store business grew steadily in the independent bookstore industry by providing your customer's needs along with a hometown feeling of loyalty. Though the mid 90's there were more bright changes while you moved to new locations for expansions and opened up more stores in the areas. With all this success your bookstores were on the way to becoming the largest independent bookstores in your trade area. But even with that success, Copperfield's book stores has been slowly succumbing to the competitive forces of our big retail competitors in the areas; Barnes and Nobles, and Borders. This was made very obvious in the business world with the closing of your Santa Rose Location in the 2004 due to a Barnes and Noble across the street only restating the point; head to head competition with the bigger retailer is a losing stragerty for Copperfield Books. A business strategy change is needed to gain more market share with an unique angle to separate your bookstore from the chains. The time has come to reevaluate your core business structure; deciding to remain centered as a hometown traditional independent struggling book store or rebuilds your new cornerstone business around used and rare books.

The main problem for your company is the trends of book buyers have decreased in independent small bookstores while increasing in the large chain bookstore. Along with that change the most important was the more steadily increase in the book buyer purchasing on the internet. In this time period the independent and small chains bookstores' share of the domestic book market decreased greatly for 24.9% to 14.9% as the internet selling market share increased to 8.1 % and the mass market retailers had a increase to 12.6 of the market share. Since this industry is now dominated by the national chain superstores, and even more so by the internets retailers, the small independent bookstore have to work overtime to keep up in the business and gain market share. The coming out of internet based bookstore was a huge impact on the bookselling industy. Our societyr enjoys the idea where you can order books in the comfort of you own home which has changed the dynamics of book buyer purchasing habits. With the ever changing convenience of the internet, people have come accustomed to shopping for anything and everything they need in their daily life at the click of a button. Copperfield bookstore should expand their business into the internet based market trend and use it to reach out to a bigger market share. Your company must focus in on a niche market segment and change your business strategy to center on providing used rare books instead of new books to gain a competitor advantage. Expanding their operation to include internet selling would help control their problem with overhead cost and might give your company a fighting change to stay financially competitor against the other retailers. Along with the rise in the internet selling another essential problem for this Industry is the adult readership in the United States has been on the decline for the past 20 years, a source from the National Endowment for the Arts Reports that in the year 2002 only 46.7 percent of the U.S population is reading Literary (Pg 331). Dealing with stiff competition and learning to capitalizing on the opening promised by the internet will pose great challenges but will keep your company independently owned and operated while recognize the needs of a different market segment to help produce a bigger profit.

The flourishing internet based book selling market allows for many opportunities for Copperfield bookstore to diversify and become very profitably. Since the once flourishing bookstore selling seems to be drying out, its time to implementing a new strategy focusing on your strongest competitive advantage which is your used rare books. Another concepts that your company should begin to establish is a globally internet selling capacity which would help maintain a different market share due to the decline in demand locally. Of course in this already greatly developed market, there are other factors and implications to consider I have provided a SWOT analysis to display how used rare books seems to be the best angle to focus on to fight back against the big retail stores like Barnes & Nobles and Borders due to their inaccessibly to these kinds of books. Copperfield's advantage would be that they would have books available for the specific customer needs and thrive on providing rare books.

USED RARE BOOKS

Strengths- Copperfield's competitors advantage in the used rare books where the chains cannot

compete with them

Accessible and well known

Higher end deals for these rare books

Weakness- Demand may be low

Hard