Bloomberg Businessweek senior reporter Brad Stone called it “a declaration of war,” breaking the news with a statement from B&N’s chief merchandising officer, Jaime Carey. The bookseller will offer Amazon titles in their online store. Last week, Amazon revealed that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will distribute print books from Amazon Publishing.

Check it out: “Our decision is based on Amazon’s continued push for exclusivity with publishers, agents and the authors they represent. These exclusives have prohibited us from offering certain eBooks to our customers. Their actions have undermined the industry as a whole and have prevented millions of customers from having access to content. It’s clear to us that Amazon has proven they would not be a good publishing partner to Barnes & Noble as they continue to pull content off the market for their own self interest.” (Via Sarah Weinman)

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He tweeted the news today: “After a great run at NYT, headed to Bloomberg BusinessWeek for a new adventure.”

Most recently, Stone wrote “Stores See Google as Ally in E-Book Market” and “In Price War, E-Readers Go Below $200.” (Via Peter Kafka)

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“Books represent a pretty good value for consumers. They can display them and pass them to friends, and they understand the business model,” said Michael Gartenberg, research director at Jupiter Research, who is skeptical that a profitable e-book market will emerge anytime soon. “We have had dedicated e-book devices on the market for more than a decade, and the payoff always seems to be just a few years away,” he said. But with the Reader getting attention (if not sales) and Amazon’s imminent e-book device on their radar, most major publishers have accelerated the conversion of their titles into electronic formats. “There has been an awful lot of energy around e-books in the last six to 12 months, and we are now making a lot more titles available,” said Matt Shatz, vice president for digital at Random House, which plans to have around 6,500 e-books available by 2008. It has had about 3,500 available for the last few years.

Still, some retailers remain wary – especially Barnes & Noble, famously invested in e-books until they got out in 2003. “If an affordable device can come to the market, sure we’d love to bring it to our customers, and we will,” said B&N CEO Steve Riggio. “But right now we don’t see an affordable device in the immediate future.”

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