Not quite sure e-readers are for you? They are a significant expense after all, and not everyone is ready to leave those delicious smelling pages behind. But you’re in luck if you live near Bexar County in Texas. They’re about to open the nation’s first bookless public library system.

My household recently signed up for Amazon Prime (mostly for The West Wing) and have been exceedingly happy with it. Not only does their streaming service offer shows Netflix doesn’t, the free two-day shipping came in handy while ordering last minute cosplay items for New York Comic Con this year. It seems they’ve decided to try a new tactic to gain customers. Much like Netflix and Hulu, Amazon will now offer a $7.99 monthly option which includes everything the $79 yearly subscription does. Sound good? Maybe, maybe not. That comes out to $95.88 a year. 

For a long time, Harry Potter fans were wondering when J.K. Rowling’s novels about the boy wizard would make their way to e-readers. Turns out, she was holding out for something extra special – Pottermore. Although you can download the series onto Sony Reader, Kindle, the Nook, and Google Play, and the retailers get a cut of the sales, the power still resides with Pottermore. Until now. Rowling has struck a deal with Amazon to offer all of the Harry Potter books through their lending library. 

When the Department of Justice announcing an investigation and subsequent suit against Apple and five other eBook publishers for price fixing, Amazon, the 1k pound gorilla of the eBook market and the biggest eBook publisher not named in the suit, immediately lowered its eBook pricing, by as much as a third in some cases. See, the way it works is, Amazon is using the market dominance of its Kindle (60% of the eReader market) to set prices lower than many publishers consider profitable, in an effort to collect even more of the market. Apple, alternatively, takes 30% of any eBook sales on iBooks, and requires any publisher they work with to never sell an eBook for less than the price they sell for iBooks. Are both attempts to create prices based on something other than immediate, per-book profitability? Yes. Are both of them at odds with each other and bad for physical book sellers? Yup.

Today, however, saw one of the weirder ways this fight is playing out, namely in the removal of all Amazon brand hardware from their stores.

As we know (and kinda love), Suzanne Collins has become the best-selling author on Kindle for The Hunger Games trilogy. However, one of the e-reader’s features, the ability to highlight a notable passage, has also been overtaken by the widely read young adult series. Amazon has posted a list of Kindle’s all-time most highlighted passages, and eight out of 10 of them come from The Hunger Games. So, it’s official: readers of The Hunger Games really like the words in The Hunger Games!

Things aren’t going so well for graphic novel and manga publishing. In March of 2011, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund issued an advisory about transporting comics and graphic novels across international borders. Two months later a comics fan named Tom Neeley was detained at the Canadian border, and his copy of the comic anthology Black Eye confiscated by customs. CBR reported then that Canadian censorship seemed particularly aimed at Japanese comics and gay-themed material.

Last week Comics Alliance reported that criminal charges of child pornography possession had been dropped against U.S. citizen Ryan Matheson, who, in 2010, “entered Ottawa on vacation with a laptop that contained comics images that Matheson described as ‘anime illustrations from art books’ and ‘drawings of fictional anime and manga characters.’”

Amazon’s Kindle e-reader created a storm when it was first announced. Readers flocked to the portability and ease of use and pretty soon you started spotting them on people everywhere. And guess what? Every single one of them was reading Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. That’s why it was just announced that Collins is the best-selling Kindle author of all time.

Amazon is sitting pretty at the top of the pecking order of the eReader market, in part because its spot atop the online retail market gives it the freedom to set Kindle prices low. Lower, in fact, than most other eReader formats; in a world where the Kindle takes 60% of the market in ebooks and is getting perilously synonymous with an electronic device dedicated to reading print publications. This means that when the company decides it doesn’t like that its affiliates want to charge more for their books, they can simply refuse to make some perfectly compatible ebooks unavailable on the platform, with devastating results to that publisher.

“This should be a matter of concern and a cautionary tale for the smaller presses whose licenses will come up for renewal,” said Andy Ross, an agent and a former bookseller. “They are being offered a Hobson’s choice of accepting Amazon’s terms, which are unsustainable, or losing the ability to sell Kindle editions of their books, the format that constitutes about 60 percent of all e-books.”

The number of times that I have been asked “Graphic novel? Is that, um, pornography?” is not insignificant. I know it’s something my mother has had to explain a few times after telling people what my hobbies and interests are.

But the Nook apparently has a slightly different problem. Its system that allows writers to self-publish their ebooks to its network also allows them to choose what genre their work is displayed in… apparently without much moderation.

Which means that there’s a ton of porn in the Graphic Novel section. Or so Sascha Segan of PC Magazine found, while trying to pick up for Eric Shanower‘s Oz series.

Amazon.com, the go-to online website for discounted products and lazy shoppers (myself included) is about to test out an actual physical store location to sell its products. If successful, you could soon have an Amazon store in your neighborhood.