Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) Titles Pulled From Barnes & Noble (NYSE:BKS) Stores

Bookstores chain Barnes & Noble, Inc.(NYSE:BKS) usually does not stock titles by Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), which has not made available to it digital formats of its titles.

However shoppers recently found some titles by the online retailer in some stores of Barnes & Noble. This prompted Laura Hazard Owen of Paid Content to write a story on it.

"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 (which are being published and distributed in print by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt under an imprint called New Harvest)," Laura wrote.

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A Barnes & Noble spokeswoman also told her, “Our policy has not changed. We are not carrying Amazon titles.”

Local stores and branches of Barnes & Noble usually are allowed some autonomy in choosing and ordering books and it is quite possible that the company may not have sent proper instructions to all its stores about its stand on the issue.

Several independent blog writers who regularly track titles by Amazon were surprised when they saw titles such as 'My Mother Was Nuts" on display in a Barnes & Noble store in Manhattan and commented on it.

"I turned up other copies in stores around Manhattan (and they are still there this morning). paidContent readers reported seeing the book in Barnes & Noble stores in Chicago, Indiana and New Hampshire. Melville House executive editor Kelly Burdick found it in Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, Louisville, Washington DC, and Boston," Laura wrote.

While Barnes & Noble does not stock Amazon tiles in its store, they can be ordered online at BN.com.

Shares of AMZN jumped 1% to $253, while shares of BKS slid 1.72% to $12.60.