Walmart recently announced that it will stop selling the Kindle in its stores. Analysts figure this is partly to prevent what is known as showrooming, where customers look at a product in the physical store and then buy it online. Analysts also believe Walmart is taking Amazon as a serious threat to its business, and removing the Kindle from its shelves is a protectionist move.
To be perfectly frank, I don’t see the advantage in Walmart carrying ebook readers in the first place. Walmart was using Kindles as a loss leader, but Walmart.com doesn’t sell electronic books. They do sell books on CD, but I wasn’t able to figure out what is actually on the disk, audio or ebook. Either way, not much of a threat to Amazon. So what was the reasoning behind using the Kindle as a loss leader in the first place? It doesn’t make sense.
What does all this mean for authors? I don’t think it means very much. Kindles aren’t really an impulse buy kind of product. If somebody wants an Kindle, they can still get it at Best Buy, or they can get it directly from Amazon. While it may be interesting and make headlines, this is more of a corporate battle than anything impacting readers.
