Race to the bottom – Amazon, Wal-Mart see who can sell the cheapest books
If you’re looking for dirt-cheap prices on a few upcoming major hardcover book releases, then you’re in luck. Online giant Amazon.com (full disclosure – I’m an Amazon affiliate) and retail giant Wal-Mart are in a heated price war over upcoming titles by some heavy-hitting authors.
For consumers, this is great, especially for the upcoming holiday season right around the corner. Major titles to be released are Stephen King’s Under the Dome; John Grisham’s Ford Country; and James Patterson’s I, Alex Cross – the latest in his ongoing series. For booksellers, publishers and authors though, this is a worrisome trend.

I have a respectable size book collection made up of mass market paperbacks, trade paperbacks, hardcovers, fiction, non-fiction, reference and so forth. Some of the reference books I refer to a lot, the mass markets on the other hand are usually read once and then shelved. I know there are a lot of people out there who have a much bigger collection of books than I do. And there are those that constantly purge their collection to make room for new books.
cac, Sep 02, 2010 re: Author smackdown: Stephen King disses Stephenie Meyer