OPINION: Change is often difficult for a business to embrace but when that change is so rapid and profound - for example when a new technology changes the way a product is delivered and consumed - it can evoke an extraordinary variety of responses. Some are profoundly brave and innovative, others laughably ineffective.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the retailing of media products: primarily books and entertainment videos. These were the first two product categories to be "Amazoned", and mainstream media retailers have struggled mightily for their very existence ever since.

Among book retailers around the world a variety of strategies have crystallised, making them business school case studies for how a category reacts to a lethal threat imposed from outside.

Apart from just rolling over and playing dead (the strategy employed by retailers like Borders and Angus & Robertson, which ended in actual death), some key strategies are as follows:

1. The ultra high-risk play

Look death right in the eye by embracing the new technology even if it directly threatens your business.

In May, Waterstones, a UK book chain with about 300 stores, announced that it would not only sell Amazon's Kindle e-reader in its stores but also make it easy for customers to buy e-books while they were there. This apparent act of suicide is a calculated risk that by improving the overall book-buying experience for both e-books and paper books, customers will keep coming back. Moreover, Waterstones has a wi-fi zone in its stores and will take a cut on whatever is sold in the zone by Amazon.

2. Acquire the technology yourself and transition over to it while revamping and downsizing your real estate

US-based Barnes & Noble, the world's largest land-based bookseller, has its own e-reader (the Nook) and e-book store that both compete with Amazon. Barnes & Noble devotes a conspicuous space in the front and centre of each store to the display and demonstration of the Nook. Meanwhile, it has to figure out what to do with its 690 full-line book stores (a worry that Amazon doesn't have), whose average size is a whopping 2500 square metres.

3. Find a niche where the disruption can't trouble you

Many mum-and-dad bookstores occupy a special place in the local community because they are not conventional retailers selling the same old stuff for mass consumption. In New York's NoHo neighbourhood, the incredible two-level Strand Book Store, opened in 1927, buys whole libraries and offers books that are old, rare, and out of print, as well as new. The store has a devoted local following that may or may not save it - time will tell.

4. Add categories to diversify the risk

B2S, a book chain based in Bangkok, Thailand, includes a large gift department in each of its book/DVD stores with an exquisite array of themed stationery items. Throw in a full-sized Starbucks cafe upstairs and you have a place where Bangkokians love to hang out on a Sunday afternoon. B2S's owner, Central Retail Corporation, is so confident it has a winning formula that it's opening another 15 stores this year alone, to bring its store count to 86.

Australian mainstream booksellers are not particularly advanced in any one of the four directions mentioned above. None sells the Kindle e-reader, and instore coffee shops with work areas and free wi-fi - now de rigeur in the US and elsewhere - are rare.

Dymocks has an online store that offers 300,000 Google e-books but these are not supported by the Kindle. And Amazon, for comparative purposes, claims to offer 14 million titles.

With their pokey little stores, artificially high book prices (an unfortunate legacy of government protection of domestic book publishers) and lack of commitment to any particular strategy except incrementalism, Australian book chains are at higher risk over the long term than their international counterparts, even if in the shorter term they are benefiting from the market share donations of competitors who have already collapsed.

- Sydney Morning Herald