The Elasticity of Demand for Books: The Research of the North-Western Federal District Book Market

Abstract

Russian book market is one of the largest in the world in terms of new titles in print. However, this market is underexplored. There is no research dealing with an empirical demand or supply function estimation for this market. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the book demand function and to check whether this kind of demand is price and income elastic. On the basis of results retrieved, managerial recommendations are to be offered. For this purpose, the demand function for books is built and estimated both on the total sample and for particular literature genres. The peculiarity of the demand model estimation is the introduction in the model covariates indicating the book content quality such as the amount of people who gave rating on the website, average rating of the book from the website and the combined effect of these two variables. An empirical estimation of these factors influence has not been considered in the previous research yet. Model estimation was based on the data of one North-Western Federal District book retail chain. According to the estimation results, book demand is price inelastic; moreover, books are estimated to be luxury goods. The analysis of demand functions for separate genres suggests that the demand for each genre is price-insensitive. Only Russian and foreign prose, foreign fiction and poetry are luxury goods among all the genres analyzed. A foreign detective, Russian fiction and sentimental novel are normal goods, whereas Russian detective is an inferior goods. The results of the research might be of a particular interest for books retail chains and publishers.