There’s no shortage of evidence that the tanking global economy is having a disastrous effect on the book trade south of the border. But this week, there have also been several news stories pointing to a slight boom in e-books.

On Monday, Random House U.S. announced that it would be doubling its output of e-books after reporting triple-digit sales growth in that sector in 2008. Now, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which put a freeze on new acquisitions this week, is launching a new series of e-books geared to the iPhone, and downloadable through iTunes. The move could cut into Amazon’s healthy sideline in e-books, which Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos says accounts for 10% of all book sales.

Elsewhere on the Web, horror author Aaron Ross Powell discusses how easy it was to post the first draft of his own novel onto the Kindle store without the intercession of a publisher (or an editor, for that matter). The result? Priced at $3.49, he was able to sell some copies of the manuscript, but didn’t generate the kind of reader feedback he was hoping for.

Finally, a German author has written what seems to be the world’s first “geo-novel,” a Web-edition of a novel in which each page of text is indexed to a Google Earth map.

Reuters is reporting that in the face of a global financial crisis, people are looking to books for answers — including cookbooks and thrillers.

[Borders vice president for adult trade books Kathryn] Popoff said sales of fiction have been strong in the past month, with a trend toward thrillers. “We’re really looking at that as the place that people are escaping to,” she said.

“There’s also been some talk in the industry about how more people will be eating at home now to save money,” said Amazon spokeswoman Tammy Hovey. “There has been some increased interest in upcoming big fall new releases from (Food Network’s) Ina Garten and Martha Stewart, whose new books are about getting back to basics.”

Predictably, market trends have also shown an increase in sales of personal finance books, biographies of key players in business, and histories of past financial crises.

While technology analysts have been touting e-ink – which mimics the glare-free quality of real ink on a page – as the breakthrough that could push e-readers into the mainstream, Forbes is reporting that the most popular e-reader in the U.S. is not Amazon’s Kindle or the Sony Reader, but Apple’s multi-platform iPhone.

Stanza, a book reading application offered in Apple’s … iPhone App Store since July, has been downloaded more than 395,000 times and continues to be installed at an average rate of about 5,000 copies a day, according to Portland, Ore.-based Lexcycle, the three-person start-up that created the reading software.

By comparison, Citigroup estimates Amazon will sell around 380,000 Kindles in 2008.

In fairness, Stanza is a free application, whereas the Kindle costs several hundred dollars to purchase, so the comparison isn’t exactly apples to apples. Another key difference is that titles available to Stanza users are public domain ones only, so no one will be reading the latest bestsellers on their iPhone.

Still, the figures do show that the demand is there for portable e-readers.

Earlier this week, Google unveiled a new feature of its book search service that may have useful applications for the publishing industry. According to CNet News, the feature will allow online retailers to embed preview pages of books on their websites, in a manner similar to Amazon’s “search inside” feature.

When you’re viewing an indexed title [that has been embedded on a retailer’s site] you’ll see a Google preview link that lets you peruse the innards of the book without leaving the sale page. According to a post on Google’s Book Search blog, larger retailers including Powell’s Books, Borders, and Buy.com will be [adding the feature] “in the coming weeks.”

[Amazon’s] “search inside” feature is essentially the same, although limited to titles within its catalog. […] Back in 2006, [Amazon and Google] traded legal blows due to the suspicion that Google’s book search program was leading towards this functionality.

For all you American political junkies out there: Amazon.com has used its book sales data to create a nifty election-year map of the U.S., where they show which states are buying more “red” books, and which are buying more “blue” books. (If you squint real hard, you can detect a few smatterings of blue on the map.)

It’s not clear at first how Amazon determined what constitutes a “red” book and a “blue” book, but if you click on the “learn more” link, the methodology is broken down for you.

The Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam rails against the U.S. textbook industry, arguing that students who use illegal download sites like Textbook Torrents and thepiratebay.org are partly justified in doing so:

As a writer, how can I support this? I should be an absolutist on copyright protection for all books, magazines, and newspapers. But I’m not. The publishers have disgraced themselves, and they are paying the price. Three-hundred-dollar textbooks in the hard sciences are not unusual, and the companies are selling to a captive audience. Hundred-dollar add-ons, masquerading as digital workbooks, or problem-solving sets, are not uncommon.

However, Beam sees hope for the sector in the form of digital, downloadable textbooks, reporting that “Amazon is promising a larger-format Kindle reader for the student market.” Beam’s tone throughout is admirably evenhanded – keeping the interests of publishers at heart while arguing that students are entitled to a fair price.

Steve Jobs found the right price point for music at iTunes. Between the pirates and the publishers, we’ll find our way to the right price point for textbooks, too.

U.S. firm Perseus Books Group is offering small publishers a chance to access digital book technology with the launch of a new service. The New York Times reports:

The new service, called Constellation, will allow independent publishers to make use of electronic readers, digital book search, print-on-demand and other digital formats at rates negotiated by Perseus on their behalf. Unlike large publishers, small ones typically lack the resources to use digital technology and as a result often bypass it altogether.

The service, which was officially launched on Thursday, involves a partnership with six major technology companies and is offered to Perseus’ 300+ distribution clients, as well as its own imprints, which include Basic Books, Running Press, and Vanguard Press.

The companies involved in the deal include Google, for its Google Book Search feature; Amazon, for its Kindle electronic reader; Sony, for its Sony Reader; Barnes & Noble, for its “See Inside” feature on its Web site; and Lightning Source, a print-on-demand company.

Publishers who use the new service can provide a single digital book file to Constellation and specify how they would like it to be used. As a result consumers may see more obscure, esoteric books available in digital formats, Perseus said.

The move solidifies Perseus’ status as one of the foremost distributors of indie publishers in the U.S., after the firm began handling distribution for Publishers Group West clients last year.

Looks like Amazon isn’t going to rest until it owns every book-related business on the planet. After acquiring Abebooks just a few weeks ago, the retail giant has now sucked up the social networking site Shelfari, which members use to share opinions of the books they’ve read. According to Information Week, Shelfari is supposed to continue operating as it always had, with “no immediate changes to its service.”

Not to be pessimistic, but haven’t we heard that line before? Executives at the used bookselling site Bibliofind said the same thing when they were acquired by Amazon years ago, and look at them now: they’ve been pretty much completely subsumed. For more history on that, take a look at this lengthy piece about the purchase of Bibliofind on the Book Patrol blog.