When Entrepreneur's Wave launched its online bookstore Monday, offering a small selection of titles geared toward entrepreneurs and small-business owners, it entered a growing industry of book sites targeting a niche audience. "There's only so much room for the giants. Bigger stores like Barnes & Noble are just overwhelming," says Dana Ehrlich, president of Entrepreneur's Wave.
Online book sales make up the fastest growing sector of online shopping next to travel sites, according to Jupiter analyst Nicole Vanderbilt - and everybody wants in. Amazon.com currently holds 1.6 percent of the online shopping market, according to a recent PC-Meter survey, and analysts have estimated its revenue to be anywhere from US$5 million to $17 million per year. Meanwhile, chain stores like Barnes and Noble and Crown Books have future plans to launch their own online retail areas. "This is an incredibly vast growing market, and if we do nothing but get our share of the new Net clients, we'll be doing as well as Amazon.com," says alt.bookstore spokesperson Michael Kelm.
Of course, establishing yourself is a challenge when you don't have a marketing budget like Amazon.com's - with its recent $10-million investment from Kleiner Perkins - or the brand leverage of a national chain. In face of big-guy competition, smaller booksellers are opting to target specialized audiences. Books2Buy, for example, is for readers who aren't necessarily looking for the latest Michael Crichton, but want hard-to-find titles and personal help figuring out which book they need - a service Books2Buy hopes will give it a market alongside the immensity of Amazon.com. This "personalized" approach includes also selling cafe-style treats, such as coffee, breads, and fudge. Says spokesperson Candie Yoder: "We're trying to make it more like a real bookstore, instead of so much cyber."
Even larger bookstores have a niche strategy - like Book Stacks, which has been in business online since 1991 and offers 425,000 titles (to Amazon's 1.1 million). It tries to represent the small presses by building a smaller, more defined audience. "We really can't keep up [with Amazon.com] as advertising goes," comments director of marketing Mary Fair-Taylor. "But we do have a very loyal customer base." The online presence is worth it: Book Stacks has watched its sales increase four times since the beginning of the Christmas season alone, garnering about 7,000 visitors per day.
For readers, the new niche bookstores offer more choices online. "There definitely have been more competitors recently, and we can see bigger gorillas on the horizon," says Amazon.com spokesperson Jennifer Cast. "There's always a need for niche or specialty bookstores, but they've got to figure out how to do it."
