Strange Bedfellows

Shelf Awareness reports today that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has entered into an agreement with Amazon to handle the distribution of the books published by Amazon's east coast publishing operation. This is surprising and somewhat bucking a current trend among publishers questioning Amazon's dominance in the book world.

Frankly, it's kind of reminiscent of the partnership between Borders and Amazon for Borders'Web site. That probably wasn't a great idea for Borders and one has to wonder about just what HMH is thinking are the advantages of this partnership.