Amazon and Wal-Mart offer $9 hardcovers: Let the games begin

October 17, 2:23 AMDC Publishing Industry ExaminerWendy Coakley-Thompson

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Wal-Mart, the giant retailer that started the $9 pre-order hardcover price war.

Company website

Wal-Mart and Amazon sought to outdo each other by slashing the price of pre-order hardcover books a whopping 60% or more off the retail price.

Wal-Mart took it to the hole first, announcing on Thursday at its e-tail site that customers could, for $10 and free shipping, order books for which that the whole world is salivating. Amazon then stole the ball, offering the same books for the same price. By Friday morning, the price had dropped a full buck.

Here’s the list of pre-order hardcovers that Amazon and Wal-Mart are offering for $9:

• Going Rogue: An American Life. Sarah Palin
• Kindred in Death. J.D. Robb
• The Lacuna. Barbara Kingsolver
• Ford County. John Grisham
• Under the Dome. Stephen King
• Ice. Linda Howard
• I, Alex Cross. James Patterson
• First Lord’s Fury. Jim butcher
• Pirate Latitudes. Michael Crichton
• Breathless. Dean Koontz

Both Amazon and Wal-Mart have been doing their share to keep book sales alive. Amazon has literally made authors’ careers, for example, by hosting its annual Breakthrough Novel Award, as well as by distributing ARCs to readers, who post reviews of those books before they are released (see Pockell on publishing: Nobody knows what The Next Big Thing is until it happens). Wal-Mart, too, provides opportunities for authors to shine, most notably through their Wal-Mart Soul Expressions tours.

On the subject of the recent precipitous hardcover price drop, though, sage voices caution against viewing Amazon’s and Wal-Mart’s actions as a harbinger of good times for the publishing industry itself. Keith Staskiewicz quite astutely writes in Entertainment Weekly that Amazon and Wal-Mart are giants that can afford to hack such a huge chunk off a book’s retail price. Some independent booksellers might not be as fortunate. Others also now question the justification of hefty hardcover prices while their eBook editions, namely those downloadable onto Amazon’s Kindle, are available for less than $10.

Booklovers, no doubt, are not pondering such weighty issues. In a down economy, scoring potential hardcover bestsellers at bargain basements prices is nothing but net.