Barnes & Noble will be publishing their own selected titles of top sellers under their B&N house imprint. I recently heard from a fellow author about how he had ordered a book from Amazon.com by 3 noted scientists.  After an unusual delay in waiting for the book, he was informed that the book had been re-published by Barnes & Noble and was now only available from bn.com.

It seems like they are using their retail market place as a grass roots source to focus on the top known sellers in expanding niche markets, and then publishing to meet those acknowledged needs.  They are using the income measured demand of books sold by subject and topic to determine what will be published as a Barnes & Noble title.  With their distribution chain of national retail stores and their effective online presence, they are positioning themselves to control the content of the more profitable books they produce and sell.  They are also cutting publishers and other booksellers out of their game plan to increase their market shares.

With the bookseller and publisher-of-what-sells transition happening, you are seeing another branch of book publishing evolving with market motivated demands determining the popular profitable content, cost-effective book production and national distribution through house owned and operated chains.  That controls content and production costs and guarantees distribution for books akin to their top sellers.  Sounds like corporate controlled print-on-demand book publishing based on the demand for books in the market place that’s owned by the publisher that controls the demand—so to speak.

Barnes & Noble has some form of partnership in place with iUniverse. However, it doesn’t seem to provide direct benefits to authors who have published with iUniverse and it seems unlikely that any of their titles will be published under the Barnes & Noble publishing imprint or added to the on-the-shelf store inventory.

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