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.

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.

There are a few authors – J.K. Rowling being the most obvious example – who can create line-ups at the cash register on the day of publication. For most books, however, even ones by popular authors, there isn’t quite the same rush to grab a copy the instant it becomes available. Nobody camps out all night for the latest Munro.

This doesn’t stop publishers from trying to create the literary equivalent of the “opening weekend,” however. Media embargoes are one technique to build up a good head of hype, but HarperCollins U.S. has hit on another, much simpler idea: countdowns. If you go to the page for Canadian author Tish Cohen’s new novel, Inside Out Girl, you’ll discover an actual clock counting down the days, hours, minutes, and even seconds to the book’s publication on August 12.

No offense to Cohen, but it’s hard to imagine even the most rabid Tish-head (if such a thing exists) needing to know the exact moment the new book becomes available, down to the second.

If you go to the HarperCollins Canada page for Cohen’s book, however, you’ll find a very different story – no countdown, no blurb, a longer description of the book, and nary an image in sight. It’s the online equivalent of a harrumph.

Perhaps there is a happy medium between pointless countdowns and a Mennonite-like shunning of frills?

The Economist’s blog takes a look at how the same market forces that led to the digitization – and ensuing fragmentation – of the music industry could eventually come to bear on the book biz. Writer Daniel Hall suggests that technology has shifted the balance for both books and music, with music consumption becoming increasingly individualistic (given the advent of the iPod), while book consumption is heading towards a more collective experience, given the rise of book blogs and other online promotions. He notes that the fragmentation caused by technology can often lead to more choice for consumers of art and media:

If this is so, it is interesting to consider the likely impacts on other cultural forms. For movies, while it is hard to imagine the summer blockbuster ever entirely disappearing, I think the net effect is likely to be increasing fragmentation. Museum art is harder to predict. Will global branding allow a few artists to attain rock star status? Or will niche artists flourish by using the internet to raise awareness and create alternative art experiences? I find myself hoping it’s the latter. In my experience the areas where technology is causing significant fragmentation—not only music but areas like news media—have become far richer and more interesting to me as a result.

Now that there’s a social networking site for everyone and their dog, it’s perhaps inevitable that one for avid readers has popped up. Juicespot.ca is a new Canadian-based website where book lovers can share and compare comments on great reads, win copies of new releases, and order books online.

The site is free to join but requires users to register before being able to post comments, though one can browse through the site’s content without signing up.

Aside from the networking features, the user-friendly, cleanly designed Juicespot offers similar content to other book-related sites – currently the homepage features an interview with author Garth Stein, whose new book The Art of Racing in the Rain is this month’s giveaway.

Microsoft is abandoning its Live Book Search venture after withdrawing from the Open Content Alliance digitization project. The company announced Friday that it will shut down the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic websites and stop scanning library and copyright books, instead relying on other library and digitization partners for book content.

Microsoft had scanned 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles to date – that material will still be available in search results, but not through separate indexes.

Columnist Andrew Orlowski of U.K. tech website The Register suggests that Microsoft is “effectively handing the future of the book to Google,” which, unlike the Open Content Alliance, doesn’t ask for permission from copyright holders before scanning content.

He writes:

For this, the ad giant has received lawsuits in the U.S. and France from authors and publishers. Google has fought back using sock puppets of its own. Stanford Law School’s anti-copyright centre has been helping out the Google cause – and received a $2M thank you in return.

[…]

Yet the policy will be brutally effective, with Google holding a monopoly on the printed word in book form.

Microsoft says it will donate the books digitised by Live Book Search to the copyright holders. Meanwhile, Google will surely never see a monopoly fall into its lap quite so easily. The future of digital books is now entirely in its hands.

Meanwhile, Nate Anderson of the Ars Technica technology website posits that the end of Live Book Search might actually be a good thing for the future of books:

The loss of resources is “significant,” [Open Content Alliance member Brewster Kahle] tells Ars, but “if we can’t pick it up from here,” then the OCA deserves to falter. Microsoft and other corporations like Yahoo have gotten the project off the ground by providing the initial scanning stations and developing the expertise needed to do the project right. While Microsoft is taking its cash with it, the company is leaving in place all the equipment that it paid for and is releasing all scans of public domain works for any use, not just education and research. According to Kahle, Microsoft has done more than it is contractually obligated to do as it ramps down its involvement with OCA.

In a way, Kahle sees the retreat of the corporations from OCA as a necessary step, perhaps even a good one. He’s a firm believer in the idea that corporations should not be the entities we trust to provide access to important cultural data stores. If people think that corporations are the right way to access the history of human discourse, Kahle says they’re in for “a series of very rude shocks.” (The University of Michigan, which has thrown in its lot with Google, does not agree.)

We’ve linked to stories about BookMooch – a website that allows book lovers to swap books free of charge – before, but here’s a more in-depth look at the site and its creator, the young high tech millionaire John Buckman.

From CNET.com:

Even though BookMooch is free to members, the site generates an estimated half-million dollars in annual book sales for Amazon because of a browser plug-in called the Moochbar, which matches members’ book wish lists to Amazon’s retail inventory. For every 25 books swapped on BookMooch, at least one person buys a new book on Amazon through the Moochbar. BookMooch collects 8.34 percent on each of those Amazon sales.

“We’re making money by accident,” said Buckman, who spoke recently at a technology luncheon near his home in Berkeley, Calif.

[...]

What’s more, within the next nine months, Buckman expects to have the inventory of books–distributed among its members–that would rival that of the largest book wholesaler in the United States. BookMooch now has an inventory of about 480,000 books among its 70,000 trading members, but at its growth rate it should rival Ingram Book Company’s 1 million books by early 2009, Buckman said.

Here’s a twist: Amazon UK is angry at British publishers for – wait for it – applying deep online discounts to their books.

From The Times:

An online price war for books has broken out, pitching Amazon against some of Britain’s biggest publishers.

Amazon is angry that Penguin, Bloomsbury and others are discounting titles on their websites, encouraging customers to buy direct instead of using the online retailer.

As nice as it is to see an online book retailer getting a taste of its own medicine, the end result will probably not be good for books:

There are fears that Amazon may retaliate by regarding a publisher’s online price as the recommended retail price and applying its trading terms to that. If a publisher discounts a £20 book to £15 online and Amazon has a contract for a 50 per cent discount on the full price, Amazon would pay the company £7.50 instead of £10. Publishers say that this would be unfair and could ultimately drive up prices.

Library Thing, a social networking website for booklovers, is offering, for your browsing pleasure, the libraries of such luminaries as James Joyce, Sylvia Plath, and Adam Smith, mostly compiled from collections held by museums and estates.

Some libraries provide few surprises: for instance, Ernest Hemingway had about a million books on hunting, bullfighting, and the first World War. But on the other hand, there’s something very touching about picturing Tupac Shakur settling down with a nice cup of tea and The Diary of Anaïs Nin.

Penguin has just launched We Tell Stories, a series of online digital fiction, in collaboration with alternate reality game designers Six to Start. They’ve asked six authors to try to harness the capabilities of the Internet in the name of storytelling.

From the Penguin website:

Over six weeks writers including Booker-shortlisted Mohsin Hamid, popular teen fiction author Kevin Brooks, prize-winning Naomi Alderman and bestselling thriller authors Nicci French will be pushing the envelope and creating tales that take full advantage of the immediacy, connectivity and interactivity that is now possible. These stories could not have been written 200, 20 or even 2 years ago.

The first story, Charles Cumming’s 21 Steps, is a thriller set in Google Maps. The text of the novel is gradually revealed in blurbs as you use Google Maps to track the footsteps of the protagonist, first through the streets of London, and then further afield.