Thalia is a chain of more than 200 book shops in Germany (a country with fixed book prices), Austria, and Switzerland.

Book stores

The shops are often located in

shopping centres A shopping center (American English) or shopping centre (Commonwealth English), also called a shopping complex, shopping arcade, shopping plaza or galleria, is a group of shops built together, sometimes under one roof. The first known collec ...

where they can regularly welcome a certain number of walk-in customers, who actually didn't go out to buy books, but do that then ''en passant'' anyway. Depending on the local situation Thalia sometimes also refrains from building a new shop in favour of purchasing an available edifice. Also whole book store chains have occasionally been taken over by Thalia Cervantes.

Local reception

Since Thalia, mainly owned by Herder Publishing Group, is a prosperous enterprise which can afford to sustain relatively large, well equipped shops with many books in stock and long opening hours, small local shops are prone to resent the settling of a Thalia shop in their area. Still the fixed prices for books in Germany give smaller competitors a chance. However Thalia has also adopted single book shops. Moreover, there is support for local businesses in the way that every Thalia chain store has a section for local literature (featuring local history, vernacular etc.), keepsakes and related articles.

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. Thalia's very own shop has a share in Thalia's growth. 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 Weltbild Publishing Group (german: Verlagsgruppe Weltbild) is a major German publisher and media retailer based in Augsburg. It is partner of the holding company DBH Deutsche Buch Handels GmbH & Co. KG and itself it is owned by the dioceses o ...

provides thus options too.) Thalia also sells

gift cards A gift card also known as gift certificate in North America, or gift voucher or gift token in the UK is a prepaid stored-value money card, usually issued by a retailer or bank, to be used as an alternative to cash for purchases within a parti ...

that can be used in their shops as well as online.

E-books

In 2008 Thalia committed itself to the German e-book market and made a deal with

Sony , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...

in regards to Sony's

e-book reader An e-reader, also called an e-book reader or e-book device, is a mobile electronic device that is designed primarily for the purpose of reading digital e-books and periodicals. Any device that can display text on a screen may act as an e-read ...

. The growing demand in

e-books An ebook (short for electronic book), also known as an e-book or eBook, is a book publication made available in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices. Alt ...

convinced Thalia to announce the release of their own device. In the same year the "Oyo" (basically a German version of the 4FFF N618) was launched in cooperation with

Medion Medion AG is a German consumer electronics company, and a subsidiary of Chinese multinational technology company Lenovo. The company operates in Europe, Turkey, Asia-Pacific, United States and Australia regions. The company's main products are c ...

, a company well known for its previous cooperations with

Aldi Aldi (stylised as ALDI) is the common company brand name of two German multinational family-owned discount supermarket chains operating over 10,000 stores in 20 countries. The chain was founded by brothers Karl and Theo Albrecht in 1946, when t ...

Subsidiaries

Thalia Germany has also sister companies in

Austria Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...

and

Switzerland ). Swiss law does not designate a ''capital'' as such, but the federal parliament and government are installed in Bern, while other federal institutions, such as the federal courts, are in other cities (Bellinzona, Lausanne, Luzern, Neuchâtel ...

References

External links

* * {{Bookstore Chains Bookstores of Germany Companies based in Hamburg