I am not without an axe to grind over Walmart's land use practices since I am an active member of the grassroots group Northwest Citizens For Responsible Growth; but the latest target of Walmart's greed-grab is taking place in cyber-space. As you have no doubt heard, Walmart.com is making a play to monopolize online booksales in a price war with Target and Amazon. It doesn't matter which behemoth wins the war, because it will be us, the readers and writers, who are the real losers.
In the 1970's, I worked for a time at two huge book retailers in Canada, "W.H. Smith & Sons," and "Classics." Classics died in its own grab for dominance, and W.H. Smith has been reduced to the newspaper stand from whence it came in England. Those were still pretty good years for publishing, with lots and lots of niche publishers and legions of independent book sellers. However narrow your audience, if the material was good, you could sooner or later find a publisher for it; and we, the reading public were all the richer for the bounty of small editions that were available to us. It was during the decades before Barnes and Noble went national that some of the greatest American literature found its way from obscurity into print.
At some point, someone in marketing heaven came up with the brilliant idea of planned "remainders." A "remainder" is a book that remains in stock after demand at retail has subsided. That book would normally be marked down in price and moved to a sale table. The idea of planned remainders was to deliberately print huge overstocks of a book in the first edition. That way, while the book was still "hot" a large number of copies could be sold at retail; but an even larger number would be expected to sell afterward at the slashed "sacrifice" price. This way far more copies would be sold and by cost-averaging, the expense of publishing, advertising and distributing the volume would be more than handsomely offset by the return. This practice inevitably became so common that we now have a situation where sale books sometimes seem to outnumber full priced ones at booksellers, and only the pound-foolish run out and buy a new release at the cover price.
It would seem, on the face of it, like readers had fallen into a vat of cream, thanks to such marketing schemes. Cheaper books must mean more to read for everyone! What's not to like? The answer to that is "plenty." Have you noticed how many great books you look for now that are "out of print?" And have you noticed that what IS in print is mainly picture books and bestsellers? That's because the small independent publishers who fostered great writers with niche audiences have all but vanished due to the pressures of a bottom-line driven marketplace. Stacy Mitchell explains this dynamic much better than I ever could in her landmark expose on mass marketing, "Big Box Swindle." In fact, she devotes most of a chapter ("Monopolized Consumers") to the demise of independent publishing and bookselling in America. It's well-worth the retail price, if you can ever lay your hands on it:
...Publishers may also self-censor books they believe the chains would dislike. More than one publisher rejected this book on those grounds. "I thought this was an excellent proposal," one editor replied by e-mail. " Genuinely fascinating, and there was interest in the meeting but the problem is the obvious one: the exposure of Barnes & Noble (sic). Our publisher shut it down immediately -didn't want to bite the hand that feeds it, etc. I hope you're able to find someone willing to tough this one out; as I say, it seems like a fine and important book." "Big Box Swindle" by Stacy Mitchell Beacon Press 2006
What Stacy will no doubt find herself writing into future editions (should there ever BE any future editions) is an epilogue on the final defeat of American literature at the hands of the marketing geniuses who started this latest price war. Having driven small publishers out of business in their zeal to corner a new discount audience, Barnes and Noble and Borders will now witness the final devaluation of bricks and mortar bookstores; and of the printed word, itself. Cheaper and cheaper editions of only "bestseller" material (and fewer and fewer of those) will become the publishing priority, with all else falling to self-publishing and the blogosphere. There is a an odd kind of symmetry to this, like the destruction of the monasteries that ushered in the Dark Ages.
Anyway, that's why I personally receive the news of Walmart.com's price war with Amazon and Target.com like the Angel of Death to American literacy.
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