Market Analysis

Industry Description and Outlook
CanGo is an Internet company that sells books and videos online and will soon offer online gaming services. The bookselling industry is rapidly changing as consumers shift from print to digital media and this means CanGo must also change their focus. The entire industry must change to meet consumer demands. Selling physical books depends on appealing to a large audience, but getting to a large audience depends on the timing of a books release, word of mouth that the book generates from readers, and the general economy. As a retailer CanGo can’t control any of these factors, but you can offer the products consumers want, adapt to changes in the market quickly, and maintain a loyal customer base.

There are a number of sources available to provide current and historical book sales trends, but let’s look primarily at 2012 through 2013, the most recent years available. The total value of the consumer and educational book sectors combined will grow from US$101.6bn in 2012 to US$104.3bn in 2017 (Orchard, n.d.). She also makes a prediction for electronic books stating that “by 2017, electronic books, or e-books, will account for 22% of all book revenues globally, at US$22.7bn, up from 9% in 2012.” This is a significant increase given the recent economic challenges we have all faced since the global recession began in late 2008. Industry sales for 2012 fell just under 1% from previous years and this was primarily due to restraints on local and state budget cutbacks in the primary and secondary education markets (Sporkin, 2013).

When we take a look at the trends over the past few years we see the overall trend is up, but specific categories in 2013 like Adult Fiction/Non-Fiction and Child/Young Adult are down from 2012 (Sporkin, 2013). For the first ten months of 2013, publishers saw total trade sales drop by three