There was the St. Louis Post Dispatch, “Turmoil over the book price war took a new turn today when the Justice Department was asked to investigate what a booksellers group called ‘illegal predatory pricing’.”

The New York Times, “(Reuters) The American Booksellers Association has asked the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate a recent price war on books sold online between such retail giants as Wal-Mart Stores Inc, Amazon.Com Inc and Target Corp ahead of the holidays.”

The Washington Post noted, “The plot really began to thicken Monday when Target got into the game. It also began selling eight of the books offered by Wal-Mart for $8.99. Not to be outdone by its chief competitor, Wal-Mart on Tuesday beat Target’s price—by a penny.”

And the Wall Street Journal said, “Wal-Mart triggered the online skirmish Thursday when it began selling the 10 most anticipated hardcovers for $10 apiece when pre-ordered on its web site. Amazon matched the offer hours later and Wal-Mart then chopped its price to $9. Friday morning Amazon had matched the price.”

Ha. The good old days. WAR! Civilian casualties to be counted later.

While too many of my fellow booksellers and authors are asking for the government to step in and stop the madness before every one of the last small independent bookshops in the country are bankrupt and only the dinosaurs roam the earth, I would like to point out a couple of things to the contrary.

This is happening just because the government has already stepped into the business arena and made it possible. Any correction the government makes will only serve the interests of the giant retailers—they can afford the lawyers who write the laws. The only thing which can correct and solve this problem, as well as a thousand others in at least as many businesses who suffer under the same onus, is for the government to get out of the protection racket, otherwise known as corporate law, which makes all of this possible.

My own small shop had to endure this sort of thing back in the late 1970’s when the chain stores first moved into Boston in a big way. We lost a major part of our new book business and had to scramble to survive by filling our shelves with lower priced used stock. This is not an option for most inner-city booksellers who must pay exorbitant rents driven by tax codes which squeeze commercial property. Only the stock turnover in sales possible with new hot titles makes paying such rent rational. Take away the hot titles, and you have an unfillable maw.

It is corporate law created by lawyers and politicians to serve their own needs which makes it possible for a company that pays taxes in Delaware to open a store in Boston and run it at a loss for five years in order to drive all local competition into the ground, while covering the losses with the profits from stores in California. This is neither Constitutional nor moral, but it has been done since the lawyers for John D. Rockefeller designed the anti-trust laws that permitted him to control Standard Oil even as it was being broken up among various states in the interests of so-called ‘anti-monopoly’ politics.

This is not ‘free enterprise’. It is state capitalism. It is the bete noire of fascists. It is the way Hitler controlled the industry of Germany. And now I hear my well-meaning friends in the booktrade howling. “Something must be done. The government must help us.”

Haven’t the war machines of the Twentieth Century taught us anything? The answer is not blowin’ in the wind with the smell of burning books.

All of my rants about the death of the book are made moot by the larger context of the political powers which are at play here. Amazon does not care about books–Mr. Bezos’ best intentions aside. It cares about price points and self-preservation. I need not say a thing about the Wal-Mart—Target–Costco mentality that is not already known by anyone who might read this.

I do not expect the best outcome here. Most of the independent new book stores and local chains in Boston died in the eighties. My shop struggled through that by living on the edge for too long and thus we were finally unable to survive the doubling rent increases of the 1990’s.

I do not expect to hear any major voice saying that it is time to tackle the lawyers. They run the show. Corporate law is what it is. And we will be paying the consequences until the war consumes us all.