Today's Booksellers: Walmart vs. Amazon?

I probably shouldn't share this depressing article in The New York Times this morning about how Wal-Mart is poised to define the book publishing industry. I'm not a frequenter of Wal-Mart; however, my one visit in the last year was utterly disturbing, largely because of its book section. I could not believe my eyes when I walked the aisles. Brand-new books were already selling in paperback for something like $4.95. I bought an older one for the same price - Julia Child's My Life in France - but I felt a little like I was committing a crime doing it. It wasn't just the cheap price but the cheap cover art. Meryl Streep was sprawled across the cover as if she were actually Julia Child, and not just the actress who played her in a film recently. Perhaps even more disturbing was the fact that Barack Obama's books were turned so that their covers faced the wall. I almost missed them altogether. Someone had come through and methodically turned them so as to erase them from the shelves (I should note here that this Wal-Mart was not in Nashville).

Here is a snippet from the article titled "Price War Over Books Worries Industry," linked above:

Independent booksellers have long struggled to compete with discounts offered by Barnes & Noble, Amazon and Wal-Mart. William Petrocelli, an owner of Book Passage, an independent company that has stores in San Francisco and suburban Corte Madera, Calif., said that for now he was relying on the loyalty of customers who valued staff recommendations and author events as much as prices. But, he said, if the low prices siphoned off too many customers and put independent stores out of business, it would ultimately affect what would get published.

“What this does is accentuate the trend towards best sellers dominating the market,” Mr. Petrocelli said. Without independents, decisions about what books to put on store shelves would reside in the hands of a few corporate executives rather than hundreds of idiosyncratic booksellers, he said.

“You have a choke point where millions of writers are trying to reach millions of readers,” Mr. Petrocelli said, “but if it all has to go through a narrow funnel where there are only four or five buyers deciding what’s going to get published, the business is in trouble.”

By the way, I never read that Wal-Mart paperback that I bought. Couldn't ever bring myself to pick it up. There is something about reading for me that includes the physical aesthetics of a book, and not just the words on the page.