http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/ref=sv_b_3
It’s the #2 best seller at Amazon. Hard to understand why they are offering such a steep discount unless sales are really disappointing.
It's a called a price war with Walmart, which is trying to attract shoppers to Walmart.com and take business away from Amazon. Plus that $9 price applies to the top 10 selling books at both Walmart and Amazon, including upcoming books from top selling authors like Stephen King, John Grisham and James Patterson.
Sarah Palin’s book # 1 on Amazon the very first day it was available for sale on Amazon, long before the price war with Wal Mart started. All this has been explained in the OP.
Stop repeating left wing propaganda.
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lossleader.asp
It is just the opposite of what you think. Wal Mart sees the sales are so strong, they want to take advantage of that traffic and drive it to their stores, so they steeply discount the prices, well below wholesale, to try to steer some of the millions of people buying it to their store. Loss Leaders are very common, although you mostly see them around holiday season. Wal Mart did them last year with Bluray players as they were the hot item. They sold them for far less than the competition to get traffic in their stores.
On Amazon and B&N as well as other large booksellers, the more volume a book does the lower the price gets. Within days of it’s release most of the “blockbuster “ novels are discounted as much a 40%. The booksellers are mearly passing along the savings they get from the publishing house for volume sales. Conversely you will see books by little known authors selling for double what these top 10 sellers sell for and for the exact opposite reason.
I just got the latest Vince Flynn novel, just released last week and from a cover price of $28.00 I got it for about $16.00. Flynn has NO problem selling his books, believe me.