Penny Marshall

Despite its almost mythical dominance in book retailing, Amazon has struggled mightily to crack the publishing business. While it sells millions of copies of other publishers’ books, Amazon can’t quite seem to get its own books off the ground and onto the bestseller charts, according to a recent Wall Street Journal piece that examined the online retailer’s publishing woes.

Case in point: Penny Marshall’s memoir, “My Mother Was Nuts.”

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.”

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Amazon.com Inc. today announced a new licensing agreement between Amazon Publishing's East Coast Group and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's newly named New Harvest imprint. New Harvest will now publish all of Amazon Publishing's New York-based imprint's adult titles in print and distribute them in North America outside of the Amazon.com platform.

Amazon.com has taught readers that they do not need bookstores. Now it is encouraging writers to cast aside their publishers. Amazon will publish 122 books this fall in an array of genres, in both physical and e-book form. It is a striking acceleration of the retailer’s fledging publishing program that will place Amazon squarely in competition with the New York houses that are also its most prominent suppliers.