Wal-Mart Pricing Not Predatory?

By Jason Boog 

a.com_logo_RGB1.jpgIn a New Yorker blog post this week, James Surowiecki questioned the American Booksellers Association’s “dubious” claims about “illegal predatory pricing” by Wal-Mart (WMT) in its Book Price War with Amazon.com (AMZN). Here’s more: “[T]here’s just no reason to believe that Wal-Mart is cutting prices now in order to raise them later: the company’s entire history has been one of perpetual cost-cutting, even after it’s become the country’s dominant retailer.”

GalleyCat has been tracking the stock performance of the major companies that influence the bookselling business. We created this chart with eight publicly-traded publishing stocks hand-picked by our readers–including company name, symbol, current stock price, and price increase or decrease at week’s close.

-Name- -Symbol- -Last price- -Change-
The McGraw-Hill Co. MHP 29.32 -0.14
Books-A-Million, Inc. BAMM 8.15 0.23
Borders Group, Inc. BGP 2.06 -0.05
Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN 126.2 5.59
Barnes & Noble, Inc. BKS 17.05 0.18
Wiley John & Sons Inc. JW.A 36.5 0.22
Scholastic Corporation SCHL 25.3 0.09
News Corporation NWS 14.15 0.04
Google Inc. GOOG 551.1 2.45
Apple Inc. AAPL 194.34 0.31
Sony Corporation SNE 28.84 0.11