A new Barack Obama biography has sparked a skirmish between Amazon and Barnes and Noble that opens a door into a war in which Amazon has been dubbed book publishing's Darth Vader. So reports Publishers Weekly in a column titled "The Audacity of Hype." The battle is over a sweetheart deal by a publisher that gave Amazon a two-week head start on the rest of the bookselling industry to promote Obama's Challenge: America's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency. 

The conflict illustrates one of the most vexing questions about taking your book to market: Amazon provides visibility, but Amazon undercuts the retail price by such an enormous margin that authors can't sell their books at retail, and bookstores are less inclined to carry it.

This war between two giants could get interesting. Barnes and Noble is already in the publishing business, producing more and more of what it sells, and it may be that some day we begin to see reverse exclusives: books that will only be available in bookstores. Although Amazon is a monster in book sales, some 60 percent of all books are still sold in bookstores. Stay tuned.

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