Thalia is a chain of more than 350 bookshops in Germany (a country with fixed book prices) and Austria, as well as a further 30 bookshops in Switzerland.
The bookshops are often located in shopping centres Depending on the local situation, Thalia sometimes also refrains from building a new shop in favour of purchasing an available building. Whole chains of bookshops have occasionally been taken over by Thalia.
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. Nonetheless, fixed prices for books, at least in Germany, give smaller competitors a chance. However Thalia has also taken over smaller, independent bookshops.
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 provides thus options too.) Thalia also sells gift cards that can be used in their shops as well as online.
In 2008, Thalia committed itself to the German e-book market and made a deal with Sony related to Sony's e-book reader. The growing demand in e-books 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, a company well known for its previous cooperations with Aldi. Since 2013 Thalia has sold Tolino e-readers.