Wiley has hired John Kritzmacher as evp, chief financial officer, starting July 1. Current cfo and chief operations officer Ellis Cousens, who previously announced his retirement at the end of fiscal 2014, will “retain responsibility for certain global operations and oversee the company’s $80 million restructuring program.” Kritzmacher, 52, recently served as svp, business operations and organization planning at WebMD and was previously cfo of Lucent Technologies and Global Crossing.
On Friday at BEA, the Publishing Hackathon awarded first prize to Evoke — which maps how characters in fiction are emotionally similar to each other as a way of discovering new books (and characters) to enjoy. The founders described it at the event as a “social recommendation algorithm that associates characters with each other based on reader preferences.”
The judges created a second prize — with an additional $2,500 from William Morris Endeavor — given to Captiv, which analyzes Tweets on the fly to recommend books that correlate (aka “a book recommendation engine based on social expressions”). Commercial viability was not a condition of the judging, but from what we saw, KooBrowser had the most market-ready offering: a widget that analyzes the text on the web page where it resides to provide related book recommendations.
The Women’s Prize for Fiction has signed liqueur brand Bailey’s (“the world’s first cream liqueur”) as its sponsor, under a three-year contract starting in 2014. Prize chair Kate Mosse said in a statement that Bailey’s was an “ideal choice” after talks with several sponsors: “We were impressed not only by the scale of their ambition, but also their passion for celebrating outstanding fiction by women and willingness to help in bringing the prize to ever wider audiences.”
The Boston Globe-Horn Book Award winners were named last Friday:
Building Our House, written and illustrated by Jonathan Bean (Picture Book)
Eleanor & Park, by Rainbow Rowell (Fiction)
Electric Ben: The Amazing Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin, by Robert Byrd (Nonfiction)
KF Literary Scouting is scouting adult fiction and nonfiction on behalf of Companhia Editora Nacional and Conrad Editora in Brazil.