E-business in Practice

Order Instructions:

• In this assignment you will investigate the world of e-books and e-readers in Southern Africa and the UK to answer the question

Will paper based books survive or will the e-media completely replace paper media

There are three key questions that need to be answered in any assessment of e-Business Strategy. You will research the topic and write an individual business report about the topic.

•Your field of research is to determine whether e-books and e-readers (such as the Kindle, iPad and the wide range of competing devices and the equivalent apps for tablets and smartphones) are delivering benefits to the authors, publishers, book sellers and to the customers and make suitable strategic recommendations to the book market sector about what they should do in the next five years, answering the question; will paper based books survive or will the e-media completely replace paper media?
• The three key questions are:-

o How rapidly and in which market segments is the market for e-books and e-readers developing?
o Do the e-books and e-readers services meet the needs and wants of the consumers, taking account of market segmentation and the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM)?
o How do e-books deliver benefits to publishers, booksellers, authors and consumers?
• From the answers to these three questions, you will then be able to develop your conclusions and strategic recommendations to the main question: will paper based books survive or will the e-media completely replace paper media?

The Report Task
This part of the assignment requires you to choose and use journal articles and text books to answer the questions above. You will also need to use internet sources and MINTEL.
You will be expected to use the following structure in your report

Introduction
You will need to introduce the topic, any assumptions and definitions, and to briefly identify and justify the key academic ideas that you will use in your analysis, such as “what is market segmentation?” “assessment of user satisfaction” etc.

Critical Analysis of e-books and e-readers
This section of your report will contain the application of your chosen academic frameworks to your analysis of the market sector and the likely developments in the future as you answer the three questions posed above.

You are likely to have four chapters in this section:-

1. Market Analysis of e-books and e-readers
2. Customer Needs and Wants from e-books and e-readers
3. Value Chain analysis from author to reader
4. Strategic Analysis of the future direction of this market

Conclusions and Recommendations
This section of your report will identify your conclusions and strategic recommendations that you have for the book market sector about what they should do in the next five years, answering the question; will paper based books survive or will the e-media completely replace paper media?
You will also be expected to have the additional, standard features for a Business Report, e.g.

Front Page,
Executive Summary
Table of Contents
Harvard Standard Bibliography

 Click here for more on this paper…….

Table of Contents & General Guidelines
This should be done using the Microsoft Word Table of Contents feature. All pages should be numbered. Use a 12 point font size. Sections and subsections should use the Headings Styles in Word.
You must use credible academic sources such as journal articles from EBSCO and EMERALD and academic text books such as the recommended text books for this module. You must not use online encyclopaedias such as Wikipedia. If you do, you will lose marks.

Bibliography:
All the information sources used in this assignment must be shown here, using the correct Harvard System method. You can obtain a document showing how this should be done from the Learning Resource Centre website, or via the UDO pages for this module.

Submission Summary
Your submission must contain the following components (the specific details are given later):
1. Cover Sheet
2. Executive Summary
3. Table of Contents
4. Business Report
5. Bibliography