For years, Amazon has been clobbering store-based book retailers through its low prices on both E-books and print books. So, is it really any surprise that those same retailers do not want to assist Amazon’s efforts to be a successful book publisher? As a store-based bookstore owner, would YOU give books with an Amazon imprint valuable space?

Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg sums up the situation for the Wall Street Journal: “Amazon.com has had lots of success in book retailing. But cracking the publishing business hasn’t been as easy. Take one of Amazon’s biggest titles for fall, actress and director Penny Marshall’s memoir My Mother Was Nuts. In its first four weeks on sale, it has sold just 7,000 copies in hardcover, according to Nielsen BookScan. Not every celebrity memoir is a hit, of course, and Ms. Marshall hasn’t been in the limelight for a while. But a likely factor in the book’s poor sales is its severely limited availability. It wasn’t stocked in the 689 stores of Barnes & Noble or Target. Some independent booksellers  don’t stock the title either. Nor is the digital book for sale in E-book stores operated by Sony, Apple, or Google. In the case of the nation’s largest bookstore chain, the absence is the result of a deliberate boycott. Barnes & Noble said in January it wouldn’t stock titles published by Amazon in its stores, citing Amazon’s decision to sign some authors and publishers to deals that will make their books available only to Amazon customers.”

Click the WSJ chart to read more from Trachtenberg.