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kleinbl00 · 3200 days ago · link · · parent · post: WALMART: Going after the heart of the Amazon Beast
Amazon's margins on books have always been essentially zero. Bezos was never interested in being an online bookstore; however, because 90% of all books at the time were sold by one distributor it was easy to set up a website and sell for basically Ingram's price (which was about 40% of retail). Because their warehouses are pretty much bigger than Ingram's at this point, there's no harm in warehousing textbooks. Doesn't mean they're a profit center. And c'mon. We didn't really have to have a discussion about how Walmart doesn't stock Advances in Automatic Text Summarization did we? ;-)