A price war is now expected to break out in the European book trade with the arrival of US pioneer amazon.com Inc. After its acquisition of Bookpages Ltd, second-largest online bookseller in the UK, rival retailers are bracing themselves the kind of across-the-board price cuts that Amazon introduced in the US. The Bookpages acquisition will enable Amazon.com to quickly offer UK and European consumers the same combination of selection, service and value that we now provide to our US customers, said Jeffrey Bezos, Amazon.com CEO. Within the UK book trade, where price competition tends to be confined to best-selling titles, Bezos’ words were taken as the signal for an all-out price war. Bookpages, which only discounts prices of around 100 titles, has immediate plans to extend cuts to a much larger range.
