Wal-Mart tries to grab some book business from Amazon.com |
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Wal-Mart tries to grab some book business from Amazon.com
Wal-Mart is trying to grab a little book business from Amazon.com. The big box chain today started offering deep online discounts on popular books before their official release date. Wal-Mart is selling its top ten pre-selling books for $10 on its website, and is throwing in free shipping. The retailer is also slashing prices on its top 200 books by 50 percent or more online.
Sarah Palin's highly anticipated memoir "Going Rogue," for example, now sells for $10 on Walmart.com, a 66 percent savings from its list price of $28.99.
Wal-Mart's new discounts are a clear stab at Amazon, which has steadily siphoned book sales away from brick-and-mortar stores. Arkansas-based Wal-Mart has been boosting its ecommerce efforts lately. It just started selling big-brand name health and beauty products online, and recently opened up its website to some third-party retailers (just as Amazon does), boosting the number of items it sells online.
Update: Amazon responded by matching Wal-Mart's $10 price on those top-selling books. Then Wal-Mart lowered the price on those same books to $9. Looks like a holiday price war.
It seems Wal-Mart wasn't pleased by a recent New York Times story asking if Amazon can become "Wal-Mart of the Web," and is now flexing its ecommerce muscles.
The Wall Street Journal talks to some of the authors of the books that are now the subject of the heavy discounting by Wal-Mart and Amazon. Dean Koontz, author of the forthcoming "Breathless," sums up the situation this way:
"Any time people are fighting over your work it's a good thing, especially when you've worked all those years hoping it would be fought over," he said. "I don't think this is going to be a long-term thing. Rather, it sounds like a promotional strategy designed to call attention to Wal-Mart's decision to enter the digital marketplace more heartily than in the past."
Interesting to see where the battle goes next.
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