Amazon, Walmart, and Target to Small Booksellers: You Can't Win

The fight for the last remaining American book buyers' dollars has just gotten a little uglier. Last week, Walmart, Amazon, and Target repeatedly undercut one another by deeply discounting hardcover books by Stephen King, John Grisham, James Patterson, and others for as low as $8. 98. The discounts even extend to book-like objects, including Sarah Palin's upcoming memoir, Going Rogue.

Independent booksellers, whose scales (not to mention economies) are much, much smaller, rightly felt like collateral damage in the big guys' war with each other. The American Booksellers Association responded by sending a letter to the Department of Justice urging the DOJ to "investigate practices by Amazon.com, Walmart, and Target that we believe constitute illegal predatory pricing that is damaging to the book industry and harmful to consumers."

Today, the Wall Street Journal's Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg and Miguel Bustillo report that Amazon, Walmart, and Target have implemented limits between three to five copies of the discounted books per customer. The reason? Independent booksellers were attempting to buy batches of the titles to sell at their stores. Presumably the smaller retailers would be pricing the titles closer to their list prices in order to—get this!—turn a profit.

One of those booksellers, Arsen Kashakashian of Colorado's Boulder Book Store, tried to buy 70 copies of Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna from any of the online giants, but was denied. "We're a big store, and if a customer wanted to order 100 copies of anything, we'd sell it to them," Kashkashian told the Journal.

Buying the books for less than 10 dollars online would cost Kashkashian and other independent sellers five dollars less than going directly to the publishers. That is, if they can manage to set up 50 different accounts and order the books two at a time.