Louisville

Yesterday, shoppers discovered that Barnes & Noble is carrying books from Amazon Publishing’s New York imprint in stores around the country, despite the company’s insistence that it wouldn’t do so.

Following our story’s publication yesterday, I learned that Barnes & Noble headquarters sent an email to its branches around the country telling them to pull the Amazon titles. This morning, a Barnes & Noble spokeswoman told me, “Our policy has not changed. We are not carrying Amazon titles.”

Jack Daniel's sent one of the friendliest cease-and-desist letters that you'll ever see to Patrick Wensink, the author of a novel called Broken Piano for President, whose cover certainly makes use of the iconography around Jack Daniel's famous whiskey.
But, rather than get all threatening, the letter is quite nice, reasonable and even (somewhat surprisingly) accommodating. It starts out by admitting that they're flattered, not upset.

With the U.S. economy on shaky ground, book publishers, like so many others, are honing in on ways to cut costs while growing their businesses. This often means tapping the resources of thirdparty partners to manage the aspects of the publishing business that fall outside the publisher’s core competencies (creating and marketing great content)—things like physically managing inventory and fulfilling orders from retail partners and consumers. For fulfillment help, publishers may turn to their book printers, which often have warehousing and fulfillment operations to complement their manufacturing services, or to a third-party fulfillment specialist. Location, Location, Location Direct-mailers will tell you that minimizing mail