We Are All Totally Screwed, Part 7,000

Okay, first of all, for those of you who are seeing some weird shit pop up in your feed reader, we are having some technical difficulties up here, which seem to be limited to my continuing ability to mistake the enter key for the apostrophe key. Oops.

Second, you may have heard that Wal-Mart is attempting to give Amazon a run for its money in the discount book department, specifically on new releases and books likely to be big sellers. I would probably not bother to read Sarah Palin's memoir if it fell out of the sky and into my hands, free of charge, but you will apparently be able to purchase it for the tidy sum of $9 at your local Wal-Mart, if that is your thing. A lot of the talk surrounding this event focuses on how Wal-Mart and Amazon can duke it out, lose money on the books in question, or even on books altogether, and make up the difference on other, higher-margin books they sell, whereas actual book stores, like Borders, Barnes & Noble, and, say, your much-loved local independent bookseller, basically can't.

Pimp My Novel has some commentary on this today as well, and one of the commenters there talks about how Wal-Mart's method of doing business basically involves convincing suppliers to increase capacity to meet Wal-Mart's demand - an investment that takes time to recover - and then refusing to pay as much for the same goods from the same supplier in the future. So that's not great, if that's what happens to publishers; it's less great for the authors whose books won't see print because publishers suddenly discover they can afford to print even less stuff that's not about vampires or aging supergenius Harvard professors.

I'm wondering what kind of effect, if any, it'll have on what kinds of books get published. I'm not coming up quickly with a good article on the influence of large states (like Texas) that centrally purchase textbooks on the content of those textbooks, but I imagine if you're reading this you've heard about it. Texas buys frillions of textbooks, approves them centrally (i.e., at the state level) and has fairly specific criteria for what can and can't be in them. Other states - smaller states, ones with less specific requirements, and ones where individual districts or schools purchase the books - spend less money in the process, have less influence, and wind up getting, in a lot of cases, what that first group of states requires. Wal-Mart, crusader for the moral and financial well-being of everyone but its own employees, evidently has a policy against selling "potentially offensive materials" which apparently includes Jon Stewart's book, pregnant dolls, and Cheryl Crow songs that suggest Wal-Mart sells guns to children. What happens if (when?) Wal-Mart becomes the go-to place for books? I'm curious about how this will play out for a number of reasons, but I'd be interested to see some debate on that particular aspect of Wal-Mart's drive, here.