Small book retailers were buying in bulk from major online booksellers because they could really save some money. One was buying up to 70 copies of a particular title -- it was $5 less a pop from the big guys than it would have been from the publisher. Finally, however, the big retailers have become wise to the trend and taken action, according to the Wall Street Journal (subscription required).

Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT), Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), and Target (NYSE: TGT) have decided to cap the number of books customers can buy online, a measure intended to prevent smaller competitors from treating them as partners. Walmart is limiting customers to two copies of a particular book, with Amazon placing the border at three and Target at five.

Target Corp. (NYSE: TGT) was a crown jewel in the retail world in 2008. It was seen as a more upscale and clean alternative to Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) but with the same discount strategy. It was winning customers for most of last year.

Then the economy went south (almost to the South Pole). Customers immediately flocked to save as much money as possible and obtain everyday staples as cheaply as they could. Target got whacked by reality. It's been playing catch-up to Wal-Mart ever since.

HarperCollins has elected to push up the publication of Sarah Palin's memoir to November 17 -- it had originally been planned for the spring, but now you'll have time to get it for the holidays.

The book, which is titled Going Rogue: An American Life, is highly anticipated because it's special on two counts. It's the first book Sarah Palin has ever written and perhaps the first book she's ever read. It's currently the number six best-selling book on Amazon.com (Glenn Beck is number two, so lock your doors).

The New York Post reports that former Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld "was so perturbed over the contents of a book on the demise of his beloved bank that he angrily phoned up a pair of traders he believed helped secretly contribute to the account of Lehman's stunning collapse last September."

The book in question is Lawrence McDonald's A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers, a former executives view of what went wrong at Lehman. Fuld called up former traders Michael Gelband and Alex Kirk and accused them of helping McDonald with background for the book.

Marc Benioff, the founder and CEO of Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), has a new book coming out in November: Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Companyand Revolutionized an Industry.

I actually got an advance copy of it -- and it is awesome. In great detail he provides the strategies for building a game-changing company. And based on Salesforce.com's latest earnings report, the momentum seems unstoppable, despite the recession and tight information technology (IT) budgets.

While in an airport bookstore recently, this title caught me eye: How to Build a Business Warren Buffett Would Buy: The R.C. Willey Story.

How could I resist? I bought a copy and read the whole thing on my flight (OK, the book is only 192 pages).

The author of the book, Jeff Benedict, tracks the entrepreneurial career of Bill Child, who transformed a furniture business -- R.C. Willey -- into a retailing giant (he came on board the company in the mid 1950s when his father-in-law died).

The collapse of Bear Stearns took place with lightning speed, and so did the publication of the first book about the firm's demise. Bear Trap: The Fall of Bear Stearns and the Panic of 2008 hit shelves in September of 2008, and is easily one of the sloppiest, worst business books written in a long time -- quite an accomplishment.

So William D. Cohan's more rigorous account of Bear Stearns has a pretty easy act to follow. Still, House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess is one of the best corporate failure books I've ever read, taking its place alongside Kurt Eichenwald's Conspiracy of Fools, a meticulous recounting of the collapse of Enron.

We've all been wondering what President Bush would do after leaving office with the lowest approval ratings in history and now we have our answer: He's writing a book.

"I want people to understand the environment in which I was making decisions. I want people to get a sense of how decisions were made and I want people to understand the options that were placed before me," he told the Associated Press.

Disgraced former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich has signed a six figure contract with Phoenix Books to write a book exploring "the dark side of politics that he witnessed in both the state and national level."

If by witnessed, you mean created, then yeah. Illinois state representative Jack Franks moved to preempt Blagojevich's effort cash in on his infamy by introducing a bill that would require politicians convicted of corruption charges to turn over the proceeds from any related book or movie deals to the state.

The publishing industry might be in the toilet, but former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is doing just fine.

The Associated Press reports that the former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has signed a three-book deal with Crown Publishers that guarantees her at least $2.5 million. The first book will be a memoir of her years in the Bush Administration, followed by a book about her family, followed by a young-adult version of her life story.

Back in 2001, Jim Collins had a monster of a business bestseller with his book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap. . . and Others Don't. In it, Collins explored companies that have become hugely successful and found that success generally comes as a result of focusing resources on things that you're good at instead of mindlessly diversifying.

Arkansas Business writer Jeff Hankins read the book again to see how the companies profiled have weathered the downturn. The companies profiled were Abbot Laboratories (NYSE: ABT), Kroger (NYSE: KR), Kimberly-Clark (NYSE: KMB), Walgreens (NYSE: WAG), Altria (NYSE: MO), Nucor (NYSE: NUE), Pitney Bowes (NYSE: PBI), Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC) and tragically, Fannie Mae and Circuit City. Gilette was eliminated from contention because of a merger.

Financial writer Robert Hagstrom has referred to investing as "the last liberal art" -- a field of endeavor that requires familiarity with an enormous breadth of knowledge and ability to synthesize between various sources of knowledge.

Numbers play a huge role in the world of investing and economics and in the current market where financial news dominates world news, we are bombarded with data every day. In The Numbers Game, Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot explain the dirty little tricks that statistics play on us, and how we can arm ourselves for dealing with them without dismissing numbers altogether.

The honeymoon between Warren Buffett and the biographer he allowed access to his personal records has ended. For more than a decade, each Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK.A) annual meeting has included a question and answer session between Alice Schroeder and the Oracle of Omaha.

The event -- held as a dinner at a local country club has been canceled, "apparently because of his displeasure with some aspects of Ms. Schroeder's 960-page encyclopedic best seller about his life," according to The New York Times.

Buffett and Schroeder deny any particular rift and say that they still do communicate, though with less frequency because the work on the book is finished.

If Buffett is concerned about the public knowing intimate details of his life, he shouldn't be. The book has sold a lot of copies but at 976 pages, it's doubtful that the majority of buyers ever actually read it.

Being the untalented brother of one of the greatest sluggers of all-time can't be easy. How is Jay McGwire dealing with it? By trying to sell publishers a on a book called "The McGwire Family Secret: The Truth about Steroids, a slugger and Ultimate Redemption."

If Jay is as bad at writing books as he is at coming up with titles, this one could rival Jose Canseco's Juiced as one of the worst books of all-time. Jay claims that his brother Mark started using steroids in 1994, and that he personally injected him.

"Mark is a man I think most would like to forgive because his reason wasn't nefarious -- it was for survival," the proposal says, according to Deadspin. "My bringing the truth to surface about Mark is out of love. I want Mark to live in truth to see the light, to come to repentance so he can live in freedom -- which is the only way to live."

The first authorized sequel to A.A. Milne's beloved Winnie the Pooh series will make its debut this year. David Benedictus's "Return to the Hundred Acre Wood" will be in stores on October 5. Dutton Children's Books is the publisher, and executive Don Weisberg says the book will be a "huge seller for a long, long time."

To its credit, Milne's estate has carefully guarded the character -- they could have easily cashed in for millions years ago by authorizing sequel after sequel. That Mr. Benedictus was finally the one who convinced them would seem to suggest that the book will be quite good.

According to The Wall Street Journal (subscription required), "The troubled book industry, in need of titles that will pull readers into the stores, will get a much-needed jolt" from the title.

I somehow doubt that Winnie will be a big enough hit to provide much relief to booksellers. But he's a hard guy not to root for.