Clay Shirky's written an interesting blog post, entitled Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization, about the role of bookstores in the social fabric, the rise of online retail, and the looming $9.99 pricepoint crisis brought on by WalMart?, Amazon and others this season.

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/11/local-bookstores-social-hubs-and-mutualization/

While his comments on the economic and cultural situation faced by independent booksellers are insightful and well placed, Shirky misses one key point: that predatory pricing (where deep-pocketed businesses deliberately take a loss on products in order to steal business away from their competitors) is a nasty and all-too common phenomenon in late capitalism. This is not a natural or inevitable facet of modern markets; it's the sort of thing that anti-trust legislation is supposed to help guard against. Far from being the result of a free market (even if you believe in those), predatory pricing steers markets into rough terrain, long-term consequences be damned.