Now the technology overlords — Amazon, Google and Apple — are competing among themselves and with other players to control how the culture is consumed. Amazon’s Kindle Fire was introduced last year to carve out some space from Apple’s iPad; since then, Google and Microsoft have brought out their own tablets.

There is constant jockeying for position. Amazon, for instance, is at odds with Wal-Mart and Target, both of which have stopped selling the Kindle, worried that it is a Trojan horse that will lure their customers away.

All the technology companies hope to bind users to their devices as tablet use explodes. There are about 70,000 activations every day of tablets powered by Google’s Android software. That is a vast number of potential readers, but Google Play, a media store for these devices, does not offer the big books Amazon published this fall. It does, however, offer downloads of a popular book Amazon published several years ago, “The Hangman’s Daughter.”

A Google spokeswoman referred calls to Amazon. “We’re going to decline to participate,” an Amazon spokeswoman said.

Wal-Mart, asked if it would be selling “The 4-Hour Chef,” said only that it would be offered online through Walmart.com. Target said it isn’t carrying the book, although it is carrying both online and in stores other new cookbooks published by the traditional presses, like Lidia Matticchio Bastianich’s “Lidia’s Favorite Recipes.”

Amazon has been publishing books since 2009. Most of its imprints are run out of its Seattle offices, including lines for mysteries and romances. Authors who write for these imprints say they are doing well, sometimes extremely well. Their sales are largely digital. They live within the Amazon ecosystem, selling their books from the retailer’s Web site.

For the moment, though, a book that aspires to be a genuine national best seller needs more than that. And that is where the books being acquired by Amazon in New York, which are distributed to the book trade by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt under the New Harvest imprint, are faltering.