The company isn’t willing to share such data with the Wall Street Journal, but Barnes & Noble and Kobo talk a bit about the types of data collection they’re doing in this piece. For instance, they can track where a reader stops reading an ebook. The article notes a few non-surprising results from Barnes & Noble: readers of genre fiction (romance, mystery, science fiction) read fast and finish books; “nonfiction books, particularly long ones, tend to get dropped earlier.”

Jim Hilt, the company’s VP ebooks, says Barnes & Noble is in “the earliest stages of deep analytics” and has “more data than we can use,” but in some cases it’s making decisions based on the data:

Mr. Hilt says that when the data showed that Nook readers routinely quit long works of nonfiction, the company began looking for ways to engage readers in nonfiction and long-form journalism. They decided to launch “Nook Snaps,” short works on topics ranging from weight loss and religion to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

For now, Nook Snaps, Barnes & Noble’s e-singles section, remains B&N’s unimpressive competitor to Kindle Singles. Apparently, though, it’s an area Barnes & Noble wants to focus on.

Amazon, which is likely doing the most interesting and large-scale data collection and analysis of e-book readers, “declined to comment on how it analyzes and uses the Kindle data it gathers.” And from this piece, we learn that interactive fiction startup Coliloquy — the first app to be chosen for Amazon’s Kindle data developer program — can’t disclose sales figures because of an nondisclosure agreement with Amazon. That suggests that as Amazon starts adding more interactive reading apps to Kindle, it will keep the most interesting data it gleans close to the vest — while doling out “stats” like the non-surprise that people really like the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice, but even more than that, they like the Hunger Games.

Discoverability and the move to B2C

Publishers are realizing that to compete with Amazon they have to be able to sell directly to consumers. One way they can do that is by making their books more discoverable. Joint venture Bookish is now almost a year late and nowhere to be seen, so startups are trying to fill the gap — for instance,  Zola Books, a New-York based company that lets publishers and authors sell e-books directly, is launching at the show. Meanwhile, the always-interesting Peter Hildick-Smith argues at Publishers Launch on Monday afternoon that bookstores are still a crucial source of discovery for readers, and that SEO and social networks aren’t coming close to filling the gap. Just don’t expect the discoverability question to be answered this year.

The two elephants in the room

Those would be the Department of Justice, which is suing Apple and big publishers for allegedly colluding to set e-book prices, and Amazon, the presumed beneficiary of the DOJ suit. Nobody’s talking about DOJ loudly or on the record, but the lawsuit affects the mood in the Javits Center and makes publishers wary of throwing back too many drinks with their colleagues from other houses.

Amazon, meanwhile, is at BEA. Its booth (which is far from the big-six publishers, but happens to be right next to the Authors Guild, which should make for some awkward conversation. Last year Amazon dropped the Larry Kirshbaum announcement the night before BEA; this year it’ll be showing off the first fall books from Kirshbaum’s New York imprint.

E-books in libraries

Library e-book distributors OverDrive and 3M Cloud Library have been battling for attention this week ahead of the fair; OverDrive rolled out an HTML5-based Web reader, while newcomer 3M is announcing new partnerships — including one with self-publishing site Smashwords — that increase its collection to over 200,000 titles. (OverDrive has about 500,000 titles.) I’m still waiting for 3M to announce a bigger client, a big-six publisher — Hachette, Macmillan or Simon & Schuster — signing with the service to make its e-books available to libraries for the first time.

What’s the next “Hunger Games”?

In the BEA Young Adults’ Editors Buzz panel, Macmillan’s FSG imprint pitches “Crewel,” an upcoming dystopian trilogy from YA author Gennifer Albin: “Gifted with the ability to weave time with matter, she’s exactly what the Guild is looking for, and in the world of Arras, being chosen as a Spinster is everything a girl could want…But if controlling what people eat, where they live and how many children they have is the price of having it all, Adelice isn’t interested.” And Quirk pitches its upcoming Harry Potter-meets-Goosebumps-esque series, beginning with “Tales from Lovecraft Middle School #1: Professor Gargoyle.”

What happened to Google?

Last year Google was a big presence at BEA. This year, Google Play has a booth but none of its execs are on panels, as far as I can find (though there is an education session about using Google+, “the next big thing right now!”). It seems that Google, which ended the partnership that allowed indie bookstores to sell its e-books earlier this year, is backing away from the e-books space, and that e-book rental service the company alluded to at BEA last year has evaporated into the cloud.

Come see me at BEA! At Publishers Launch on Monday, June 4, I’m moderating a panel at 11:25AM ET: “Agents in Transition: Direct publishing, new deals and rethinking sub-rights. At IDPF Digital Book on Tuesday, I’m doing a presentation on e-singles at 9:00AM ET: What they are, why they matter and what’s next for that format. And on Wednesday at 9:00AM ET, I’m leading “Apps for Publishers: The What, Why and How Workshop.” In between, you’ll find me on the floor and on Twitter @laurahazardowen.

Plus, don’t miss GigaOM executive editor Ernie Sander at IDPF Digital Book on Monday, talking about emerging models for content monetization.

Photos courtesy of Flickr / ButterflySha

Here’s 1,191 U.S. publishers’ net sales for February 2012, compared to February 2011:

Hunger Games is selling so well, in fact, that Scholastic increased its earnings guidance this week. The movie was released March 23, so we’d expect to see even strong YA sales reflected in AAP’s March stats (which will be released next month).

The AAP notes that adult e-book growth in February 2012 appeared to slow (adult e-book sales were only 9.9 percent higher this February than last February) because February 2011 included “an unusual one-off retail revenue transaction” making sales that month “abnormally high.” The AAP was also collecting data from many, many fewer publishers last February (under 100 compared to 1,191 now) so it may indeed be true that adult e-book sales are flattening — but we’d need more than a month of data to deduce that.

Note that adult hardcovers sold well this February — a 25.5 percent increase over last year. And religious e-books continued to show strong growth, with those sales up 49.2 percent over last year, though the total sales are still relatively small at $7.6 million.

I first noticed it around 3:20 p.m. eastern when all of the titles in a Harry Potter search on the iPad Kindle storefront in Safari showed up as “currently unavailable” as did all the titles on the top 100 paid list. The browser version was still saying titles weren’t available in the U.S. a little before 4 p.m.; it’s back to normal now.

Is it the Pottermore effect? The Harry Potter site and its store appear to be working fine. Maybe it’s the collision of the first movie week for the Hunger Games and the Harry Potter release — or some other error that coincidentally hit at just the wrong time. We’ve asked Amazon for an explanation.

Kobo is running a mostly unpublicized deal offering each of the e-books in the Hunger Games trilogy, published by Scholastic, up to 85 percent off list price. Add one of the e-books to your cart and apply coupon code “HUNGERGAMESDEAL,” “HUNGERGAMESDEAL2″ and “HUNGERGAMESDEAL3″ to get it cheaper than anywhere else: The first e-book in the trilogy, Hunger Games, gets knocked down to $0.83 with the coupon; the second e-book, Catching Fire, is $1.16 with the code; and the third, Mockingjay, is $1.07. (Note that Scholastic does not use agency pricing; therefore, stores that sell its e-books can sell them at whatever prices they want.)

The super-low prices don’t appear until the e-books are in your cart with a coupon code applied, and so far, Amazon’s algorithm hasn’t caught the discounted prices and matched them. At Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), the trilogy is taking up the top three spots on the Kindle bestseller list — and at number five is the bundle of all three titles for $18.99. Katniss’s story is interrupted only by 50 Shades of Gray at #4.

At Amazon’s Kindle store, The Hunger Games is $5. Catching Fire is $7.70 and Mockingjay is $7.14. All three titles are also available through Amazon’s Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, which lets Kindle-owning prime members borrow one e-book per month for free. The trilogy is $18.99 as an e-book bundle. It will be interesting to see if Amazon matches Kobo’s extremely discounted coupon prices.

At Barnes & Noble’s Nook store, the trilogy takes up the top three spots on the Nook bestseller list, at prices higher than Amazon’s: Hunger Games for $8.49, Catching Fire for $9.79 and Mockingjay for $9.79. The three bundled e-books are $28.29, nearly $10 more expensive than Amazon.

You’ll also find deals on other Scholastic dystopian YA e-books (yeah, Hunger Games is just the tip of the iceberg). Five of the titles are $2.99 each at Kobo; the same titles are $1.99 each through Amazon’s Kindle Daily Deal.

Finally, Hunger Games publisher Scholastic is running a deal on YA dystopian e-books by lesser-known authors (yeah, Hunger Games is just the tip of the iceberg), selling five of them for $1.99 each. Those books are available as Amazon’s Kindle Daily Deal.

The promotions are designed to capitalize on movie hype and draw shoppers into stores. Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy, which is aimed at teens but has wide crossover appeal to adult audiences, has sold more than 26 million copies since the first book’s release in 2008. The titles have been on the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) bestseller list for over three consecutive years.

The offers are available in 26 Barnes & Noble stores across the country, mostly upscale mall and shopping center stores (and, in NYC, the Barnes & Noble in Tribeca). Customers who buy a Nook in one of those stores on March 10 will receive two free tickets to advance Hunger Games screenings, which take place March 19 in NYC and LA and March 21 in the other cities. (The movie opens nationwide March 23.)

All customers who buy a Nook in those participating stores between March 10 and March 20 “will receive an invitation for early VIP access” to the store’s Hunger Games parties, which are all taking place March 21.

Anyone who buys a Nook now in any Barnes & Noble store from today through April 15 will receive one free Hunger Games Nook book.

The Hunger Games trilogy is also a highlight of competitor Amazon’s Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. All three of the Hunger Games e-books are available for free borrowing by Prime members who own Kindles.

Barnes & Noble has run other promotions designed to get shoppers into its stores — or, as it likes to call them, “showrooms.” Over the holidays, shoppers could get an exclusive James Patterson novella, and an Angry Birds promotion last summer let store visitors add a new Angry Birds character to their apps.