The book world feels like a day at the races.

This month, it's Stephen King in lucky lane four, John Grisham next door, Sarah Palin to his right and Barbara Kingsolver coming up on the outside. Meanwhile, Dan Brown has already left the gate, and the race is so tight, everyone seems a bit edgy.

November is the month for publishers to bring out what they hope will be their biggest and most profitable best sellers. That's not new. But this year's competition is even more high profile than usual, and an ongoing online price war has a lot of book insiders wondering about the future.

One thing booksellers acknowledge is that the fall schedule is an attempt to entice holiday shoppers.

"It's an effort to get them out at Christmas time," says Vicki Erwin, owner of Main Street Books in St. Charles. "This is when your cash comes in."

The number of days between Thanksgiving and Christmas hasn't changed, but sellers like Susan Allen feel that they need even more time to get a jump on holiday traffic.

Allen, general manager of Borders in Sunset Hills, has worked for bookstores for 15 years. This year, she says, "there is such a good selection, anyone who wants a book for Christmas can find one."

A year ago, the news about books usually focused on political titles. Sarah Palin may have lost the election, but her memoir, "Going Rogue," which goes on sale Nov. 17, promises to be one of late fall's biggest sellers. Riding her coattails will be two books more critical of Palin ("Going Rouge" and "Sarah From Alaska").

But political tales are a smaller part of the story this year.

In the past few weeks, some of the biggest novelists in U.S. publishing have released titles: John Irving, Philip Roth, Jonathan Lethem and Patricia Cornwell. Even Michael Crichton, who died a year ago, has a new book coming out.

Authors also are on the road. Danielle Borsch, events coordinator at Left Bank Books, has had a wealth of speakers:

"In one week this year, we hosted Deepak Chopra, R.A. Salvatore, John Grogan, Eoin Colfer and Andy Williams, all of them with a large and dedicated following in their respective genres," she said.

This week is busy with Lethem, Anita Diamant, Sherman Alexie and former U.S. Sen. Jean Carnahan.

Borsch says: "I know that there will always be two times for us that are exceptionally packed full of great author events: October-November and April. The fall is the biggest one by far."

Casting a pall over some of the enthusiasm for big books is the online price war involving mass merchandisers Wal-Mart, Amazon and Target.

In October, the three cut the price of 10 upcoming best sellers to about $9.

King's book "Under the Dome" (reviewed on Page D9) is one.

With a list price of $35, the book probably cost retailers about $17. Selling it at $9 doesn't hurt King or his publisher, and it loses money for the online site. Just as a "loss leader" is an effort to pull customers into a store so they will buy goods other than the deeply discounted, the online sale is an effort to pull more business to the mass merchandisers' online sites.

Some say it's an obvious effort to drive book buyers away from more traditional bookstores, both chain stores (like Borders and Barnes & Noble) and independents (like Left Bank and Main Street books).

The American Booksellers Association wrote a letter Oct. 22 to the U.S. Department of Justice to complain about the online sellers' "predatory pricing." Soon after, King, Grisham and others, who actually stand to make even more money during the price war, were saying that ultra-low prices do not bode well for the book industry.

"We run the risk of seriously devaluing our product," Grisham told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

Albert Greco, a professor at Fordham University's Graduate School of Business Administration and senior researcher at the Institute for Publishing Research, says Wal-Mart wants to become the "Wal-Mart of the Internet." Already the biggest real-world retailer, it is rattling its e-business swords at Amazon.com, he says.

"Grisham is a very smart guy," Greco says.

Although an online price war will help sell more copies of Grisham's "Ford Country," eventually it would hurt stores that carry thousands more titles than Wal-Mart does. It's the more traditional stores that stock older Grisham titles.

"What he's looking at is the state of book retailing," Greco says.

Before Grisham became well-known, he asked small bookstores whether he could set up a table to sell his first book, "A Time to Kill." They gave him the chance to peddle his product, and several million books later he no longer needs that table. But he hasn't forgotten those stores, he says. Wal-Mart may want Grisham, but it isn't going to give the next unknown writer a chance.

Erwin, of Main Street Books, says that with all the attention paid to the horse race, "anything that isn't big can get lost in the shuffle."

Although the availability of book outlets has increased, what they carry varies. Bookstores such as Barnes & Noble may stock about 170,000 titles. A discount store like Target may stock 14,000, and a club store, such as Costco, may stock a few hundred. In an effort to promote stores, Publishers Weekly dubbed Nov. 7 National Bookstore Day.

Greco expects online retailers to discount even more titles this fall, although perhaps not as low as $9.

But why discount books?

"The belief that people aren't reading is inaccurate," he says. "To assume this is a bad category is not true."

U.S. publishers expect to net about $10 billion this year. That covers just adult and children's trade books and doesn't include the extensive textbook market.

"They've been talking about the death of the book for a long time," Greco says. "The numbers don't seem to bear that out."