Forget books, look at movies.
Stores will get shipped in hundreds of new release movie. They keep it for a few weeks/months, ship overstock back, get markdown dollars from the vendor to mark it down, ship them all back, get them back in with new, cheaper assortments, ship those back, get them back in for Black Friday sales. etc.
Video games are weird - and I think Nintendo is likely to blame. Once a store/chain orders games, they own it. It's said and done. Maybe they'll get markdown dollars at some point down the road, but overstock returns are unheard of.
If you read the book Game Over, it talks about Nintendo's early days dealing with an unnamed large retailer (probably Children's Palace, maybe TRU or K-Mart. Man, look at that lost of retailers) in the days of the Game and Watch. Now, the book is a lot of guesswork based on multiple interviews and here say, but the story goes that a retailer had a bunch of overstock Game and Watch units, so they phone Nintendo to inquire about markdown dollars. For those who don't know, it's common in the US (and many other countries) that a retailer buys a bunch of product (toys being a big category for this) from the vendor, then, if it doesn't sell, the vendor will basically give them $x/unit that didn't sell (or, at least, credit towards future orders based off this) so the retailer can mark the merchandise down. In Japan, this is unheard of - once the retailer buys it, they own it. So when the retailer contacted them to ask about markdowns, Nintendo was all "lol. whut. no.". The retailer supposedly then informed Nintendo that they would no longer be playing any future orders with them. So Nintendo caved.
I really think this is A.) Why movies are treated so vastly different from video games. Remember, Nintendo basically created the modern video game market. Pre-Nintendo was a completely different world. B.) Why you *rarely* see first party titles drop in price outside of Player's Choice releases, and C.) Why Nintendo really short-ships every new item, because they feel they were burned before and don't want to be again.