Orange County Register

Price wars are going on right now among the biggest book retailers, who are duking it out hoping to get your book-buying dollars.

Wal-Mart fired the opening salvo, lowering its prices on bestsellers to $10.  Amazon.com responded by dropping its prices to $9, after which Wal-Mart lowered prices again, to $8.99. Target also jumped into the fray somewhere along the way.

The situation got so ridiculous that smaller bookstores saw an opening, and started buying up the below-cost books and reselling them, leading the Big Three to start limiting the number of copies you could buy at one time.

I took a look Thursday night at Amazon.com and this is what I found you could buy for $9, all a fraction of their cover price:

• Under the Dome by Stephen King
• Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton
• I, Alex Cross by James Patterson
• Breathless by Dean Koontz
• Going Rogue by Sarah Palin

Of course, if you want to read these books without paying a dime, all you have to do is get a free library card at your local library.

Click here to learn more about finding your local library and getting a card.

Meanwhile, if you want to learn more, here are some newspaper stories about the price wars:

• Price War Over Books Worries Industry–New York Times
• Latest Battle in Book Price Wars–Boston Globe
• Amid Price War, Three Retailers Begin Rationing Books–Wall Street Journal
• Book Price War Heats Up–Time magazine

Do you have a tip for the Deals Diva? Email me at mfisher@ocregister.com.

And look for me @DealsDiva on Twitter!

More OC Deals here:

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.