Thalia (bookstore)

Last updated

Thalia Bücher GmbH
Industry Retail
Website thalia.de
thalia.at
thalia.ch
Thalia bookstore in Vienna W3 Wien 01.jpg
Thalia bookstore in Vienna

Thalia is a chain of more than 350 bookshops in Germany (a country with fixed book prices) and Austria, as well as a further 30 bookshops in Switzerland. [1] [2]

Contents

Bookshops

The bookshops are often located in shopping centres [3] Depending on the local situation, Thalia sometimes also refrains from building a new shop in favour of purchasing an available building. [4] Whole chains of bookshops have occasionally been taken over by Thalia. [5]

Local reception

Since Thalia, mainly owned by Herder Publishing Group, [6] is a prosperous enterprise [7] which can afford to sustain relatively large, well equipped [8] shops with many books in stock [9] [10] and long opening hours, small local shops are prone to resent the settling of a Thalia shop in their area. [11] Nonetheless, fixed prices for books, at least in Germany, give smaller competitors a chance. [12] However Thalia has also taken over smaller, independent bookshops.[ citation needed ]

Multichannel marketing

The company early on picked up the concept of multichannel marketing and therefore taken a stake in an established German online book shop. [13] Thalia's very own shop [14] has a share in Thalia's growth. [15] Customer from rural parts of the country can order books online and hereby make sure that even special titles are available and reserved when they go shopping on the weekend. Elderly people who have difficulties leaving their house can phone a Thalia chain store and ask to have books sent to their home and the receiving employee will carry out the order online instead of the customer. (The national competitor Weltbild provides thus options too.) Thalia also sells gift cards that can be used in their shops as well as online. [16]

E-books

In 2008, Thalia committed itself to the German e-book market and made a deal with Sony related to Sony's e-book reader. [17] The growing demand in e-books convinced Thalia to announce the release of their own device. [18] In the same year, the "Oyo" (basically a German version of the 4FFF N618) was launched in cooperation with Medion, a company well known for its previous cooperations with Aldi. [19] [20] [21] Since 2013 Thalia has sold Tolino e-readers.

References

  1. ↑ Heijdenrijk, Kim (2009). "Independent Booksellers and the Fixed Book Price: a Horror Story?". Bookstore Guide. Archived from the original on 14 April 2011. Retrieved 17 February 2020. Thalia is a chain of bookstores in Germany, one of the first countries that introduced the fixed book price.
  2. ↑ "Thalia Group expands in Austria" . Retrieved 7 May 2011.
  3. ↑ "Further tenants are a Rewe grocery store, Intersport Voswinkel, a dm drug store, Deichmann shoes and a Thalia book store" . Retrieved 7 May 2011.
  4. ↑ "This week saw the long awaited opening of the Thalia Bookshop in Bonn's Market Square". English-Network. Retrieved 7 May 2011.
  5. ↑ "Thalia Buchhandlung GmbH acquires Buch Kaiser GmbH" . Retrieved 7 May 2011.
  6. ↑ "Neuer Mehrheitsgesellschafter / Herder steigt bei Thalia ein". Börsenblatt (in German). 11 July 2016. Retrieved 17 February 2020.
  7. ↑ "Thalia Bookstore Sales Up 7.5%". 12 August 2009. Retrieved 7 May 2011.
  8. ↑ "Thalia as reference for a producer of escalators" . Retrieved 7 May 2011.
  9. ↑ "English-language bookstores in Hamburg" . Retrieved 7 May 2011.
  10. ↑ "a large-ish section of "International Books", the majority in English" . Retrieved 7 May 2011.
  11. ↑ "Showdown in Germany" . Retrieved 7 May 2011.
  12. ↑ "They were incredibly jealous to hear of the fixed-book pricing law in Germany which allowed independent brick-and-mortar stores to compete against Amazon and Thalia, the German online bookstore giant" . Retrieved 7 May 2011.
  13. ↑ Elfes, Holger (7 October 2010). "Douglas Sales Beat Forecast on New Stores, Germany". Bloomberg. Retrieved 7 May 2011. [...] revenue at Douglas's Thalia bookstore chain gained 10 percent to 905 million euros, propelled by the unit taking a majority stake in buch.de, an online service.
  14. ↑ "a chain called Thalia that runs over 230 bookstores in Germany and also has an online shop" . Retrieved 7 May 2011.
  15. ↑ "Following the release of their 2010 sales figures, the second largest German book store chain, Thalia, has also pinned its success on multichannel approaches". 9 March 2011. Retrieved 7 May 2011.
  16. ↑ "Giftcards from Thalia" . Retrieved 7 May 2011.
  17. ↑ "Top German chain bookstore Thalia struck a deal with Sony to sell content for its Reader devices in Thalia stores and online" . Retrieved 7 May 2011.
  18. ↑ "Germany's Thalia Bookstore to launch ereader" . Retrieved 7 May 2011.
  19. ↑ "Oyo reader review (on english)". YouTube . 21 December 2010. Retrieved 7 May 2011.
  20. ↑ Hoffelder, Nate (4 September 2010). "Thalia to sell Oyo e-reader with Wifi, touchscreen". The Digital Reader. Archived from the original on 13 September 2015. Retrieved 17 February 2020.
  21. ↑ "Those who purchase it receive mobile access to thousands of e-books. In the case of Thalia, that number is even in the hundreds of thousands" . Retrieved 7 May 2011.
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