Following our story’s publication yesterday, I learned that Barnes & Noble headquarters sent an email to its branches around the country telling them to pull the Amazon titles (which are being published and distributed in print by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt under an imprint called New Harvest). This morning, a Barnes & Noble spokeswoman told me, “Our policy has not changed. We are not carrying Amazon titles.”

Without further clarification from Barnes & Noble (though I’ve asked the company for it), it appears that local Barnes & Noble branches ordered and stocked copies of Penny Marshall’s My Mother Was Nuts and Jessica Valenti’s Why Have Kids?, possibly because the company hadn’t stated its policy clearly enough to the stores and because local branches have always had a fair amount of latitude in choosing the titles they want to stock.

Moby Lives, a blog operated by independent publisher Melville House, first saw My Mother Was Nuts on a display table in a Manhattan Barnes & Noble. I turned up other copies in stores around Manhattan (and they are still there this morning). paidContent readers reported seeing the book in Barnes & Noble stores in Chicago, Indiana and New Hampshire. Melville House executive editor Kelly Burdick found it in Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, Louisville, Washington DC, and Boston.

Barnes & Noble said in February that it would not stock Amazon Publishing titles in its “store showrooms” and that readers could only buy them online at BN.com. That appeared to be a stricter statement than CEO William Lynch’s comment to Publishers Weekly in August 2011 that “we will not stock physical books in our stores if we are not offered the available digital format.” Amazon is making its New York imprint titles available to other ebook retailers, but (at least so far) Barnes & Noble isn’t selling Nook versions of the books.

Kelly Burdick, the executive editor at independent publisher Melville House, noticed one of Amazon’s lead titles, the Penny Marshall memoir My Mother Was Nuts, in a Barnes & Noble store on Manhattan’s Upper East Side this weekend. Actually, not only was the book in stock, it was displayed on a table at the front of the store.

I used the “Pick Up In Store” feature on BN.com to check for other Amazon Publishing titles in Barnes & Noble’s NYC stores. My Mother Was Nuts is in stock at the five Barnes & Noble stores closest to me. Another Amazon Publishing title, Jessica Valenti’s Why Have Kids?, is in stock at two of five stores near me.

Why did Barnes & Noble capitulate? I’ve asked the company that question, but since I haven’t gotten a response from them yet, a few possibilities:

• Because Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is publishing and distributing the print versions of Amazon New York’s titles, maybe Barnes & Noble’s okay with carrying them. That was my theory back in January, but I figured I was wrong after Carey’s February statement that B&N wouldn’t carry the books in its stores.
• Because Amazon is making its New York ebooks available to other digital bookstores through distributor Ingram, maybe Barnes & Noble went with its earlier statement that it wouldn’t carry the print books in stores unless it also had access to the ebook editions. Oddly, though, Nook editions of Why Have Kids? and My Mother Was Nuts are still unavailable.
• A theory from Publishers Lunch news editor Sarah Weinman:

@laurahazardowen another theory: Valenti and Marshall are local authors; is that the case nation-wide? (Anastas is local too…)

— Sarah Weinman (@sarahw) October 1, 2012

So here’s your homework for today: Visit a Barnes & Noble store near you and see if you can find one of these books there.