Laura Owen

A new report by BookStats finds that trade (consumer) ebook revenue in the US was roughly flat between 2012 and 2013, even as the number of ebooks sold rose by 10.1 percent to an estimated 512.70 million.

The German Publishers and Booksellers Association (Börsenverein) asked German antitrust authorities to investigate Amazon’s actions against publisher Bonnier in the country.

Amazon responded to the German complaint in a long statement. It denied that it’s delaying shipments of Bonnier titles, and said that it is instead keeping fewer of them in stock. It also said that it should receive larger discounts on e-books than it does on print books.

“We are aware of the complaint by the Börsenverein that alleges that we are delaying shipments to customers -- this allegation is not true,” Amazon said. “We are currently buying less print inventory than we ordinarily do on some titles from the publisher Bonnier. We are shipping orders immediately if we have inventory on hand. For titles with no stock on hand, customers can still place an order at which time we order the inventory from Bonnier -- availability on those titles is dependent on how long it takes Bonnier to fill the orders we place. Once the inventory arrives, we ship it to customers promptly.”

Most of the laws governing data privacy and security in the US are nearly 30 years old, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith said -- but with gridlock in Congress, that may not get better any time soon.

Private companies have to step up and make sure that customers’ data is secure, Smith said.

“We’re living in a time when Congress doesn’t get much done,” he said, but acknowledged that data privacy issues are also uniquely complex, making it more difficult for lawmakers to act on them. “It’s technically complex, it’s legally complex” and it involves two equally important values -- privacy and public safety.

In Amazon and Hachette’s ongoing battle over a new contract, Amazon has received most of the blame -- and that’s probably not surprising since it’s the party cutting off pre-orders, messing with search and shipping Hachette books with multiweek delays.

Authors, in particular, have come out on Hachette’s side -- John Green, J. K. Rowling, James Patterson and Malcolm Gladwell (who shall henceforth be known as Explaino the Clown). So nobody’s on Amazon’s side, right? Well, not so fast. To every backlash there is a counter-backlash, and in recent days some pro-Amazon sentiment has trickled out -- or if it’s not fully pro-Amazon, exactly, it’s at least … conflicted. So who’s saying what? Here are the general themes:

• Hachette is a big company, too
• If authors hate Amazon so much, they should pull their books from it
• It’s complicated, i.e., everyone wants to make money.

Amazon responded to the ongoing controversy over its decision to limit availability of Hachette titles as the companies try to negotiate a new contract.

Digital self-publishing site Smashwords is making its e-books available to more libraries through a partnership with Overdrive, the country’s largest digital library distributor.

Through the partnership, Overdrive library clients -- the company works with about 28,000 libraries and schools worldwide -- will be able to purchase about 200,000 e-books by 88,000 Smashwords authors and lend them out to their patrons.

Smashwords is not a stranger to libraries: It already has deals with distributors Baker & Taylor Axis 360 and 3M Cloud Library, as well as with regional library systems like Colorado’s Douglas County.

Because so many libraries work with Overdrive, however, and because Overdrive supports Kindle e-readers while its competitors do not, this partnership has the potential to bring Smashwords authors’ titles in front of more readers globally. Two hundred thousand titles is a lot and most libraries won’t be purchasing nearly all of them. For libraries that want to purchase titles and aren’t sure where to start, Smashwords and Overdrive are creating curated collections of Smashwords’ bestselling titles.

Visitors to the New York Public Library’s website will have a new way to decide what to read next: The library is partnering with New York-based startup Zola Books to offer algorithm-based recommendations to readers.

The technology comes from Bookish, the book discovery site that Zola acquired in early 2014. With the Bookish partnership, the recommendations will be based on the content of a book itself.