Identification of the Optimal Business Model on the Example of St. Petersburg Book Market

The rapid changes experienced by book market over the past two decades make worry not only key players of this market but also economists. Since development of new technologies such as e-books, e-readers, or online sales the market has become more complex: while some new participants, which use online sales, are growing fast, many traditional brick-and-mortar shops stop their existence. In modern conditions, the business model of bookstores is transforming. We can observe similar situation in Russia. What is more, there is a lack of economic research on this topic. It is necessary to consider characteristics of the contemporary book market and main players to understand how it works and what trends are present now. The goal of this paper is to explore the structure and features of Russian book market and identify optimal business model for book selling. Saint Petersburg`s market is taken as the example. The author has collected the data about booksellers in Saint Petersburg and conducted various analyses: content, descriptive and regression. The author finds that the situation in the Russian market seems to be similar with situation in the foreign markets: on the book market of Saint Petersburg we can find big players like Bookvoed that try to be more than traditional bookstores but places of culture and recreation thereby winning a large market share. The results of this study show that such characteristics as: number of branches, form of a book shop, presence of website, pages in social networks and mobile application lead to higher revenues of a bookseller. The findings are highly relevant: in the end the author describes an optimal business model and gives practical recommendations for booksellers and potential investors.