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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.
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