U.S. booksellers' association asks if big chains' price war is "predatory"

Readers and writers should be very interested in a request from the American Booksellers Association to the U.S. Department of Justice, asking them if a price war among Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Target Corp. constitues "illegal predatory pricing".

Walmart.com last week announced that it would sell the 10 most anticipated new books of the season for $10 online. Amazon matched them, then so did Target and Wal-Mart responded by lowering its price to $8.98, one penny less than Target.

A short-sighted view might be that it's great that bestselling hardcovers are going for US$8.98, but a bit more reflection will see that this is, as the ABA says, "damaging to the book industry and harmful to consumers". In a story in the Wall Street Journal, it points out that, while the price war might generate more reading, it may put independent bookstores under.

The letter said while it may appear that the prices will generate "more reading and a greater sharing of ideas in the culture," many of the independent stores that belong to the ABA won't be able to compete.

"The net result will be the closing of many independent bookstores and a concentration of power in the book industry in a very few hands," the letter said.

But let's not get our hopes up. As Gary Reback, an antitrust attorney in Palo Alto, Calif., said in the WSJ article:

"Successful predatory-pricing cases are as rare as Bigfoot sightings."