It turns out that Wednesday’s announcement of the National Book Awards was not entirely error-free, as in the early afternoon a sixth nominee in the Young People’s Literature category – CHIME by Fanny Billingsley, published by Dial – was added to the list. “We made a mistake, there was a miscommunication,” executive director of the National Book Foundation Harold Augebraum told the LA Times. “We could have taken one of the books away to keep it five, but we decided that it was better to add a sixth one as an exception, because they’re all good books.” Updating news from […]
National Book Award Nominees; New Literature Prize Proposed In UK
The National Book Award nominees were announced on Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Think Out Loud program. The winners will be named on November 16. Fiction Andrew Krivak, THE SOJOURN (Bellevue Literary Press) Tea Obreht, THE TIGER’S WIFE (Random House) Julie Otsuka, THE BUDDHA IN THE ATTIC (Knopf) Edith Pearlman, BINOCULAR VISION (Lookout Books) Jesmyn Ward, SALVAGE THE BONES (Bloomsbury) Non-Fiction Deborah Baker, THE CONVERT: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (Graywolf) Mary Gabriel, LOVE AND CAPITAL: Karl & Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution (Little, Brown) Stephen Greenblatt, THE SWERVE: How the World Became Modern (Norton) Manning Marable, MALCOLM […]
Irony, Iceland and Insight from Execs Opens Frankfurt Book Fair
Ironies abound if you know where to look here in Frankfurt, where the annual Book Fair is unfolding in its usual fashion. There is the host city itself, the the banking center of Germany, which has sprouted dozens of modern skyscrapers in the past decade as the Euro zone has boomed, feeling less brash and more uncertain than ever as the world waits to see if Germany will take some of the past decade’s earnings and plow it back into supporting the economic union that made it possible. Then there is this year’s guest of honor, Iceland. They signed on […]
Pan Macmillan’s Digital Imprint, Now Called Bello, Kicks Off With Curtis Brown UK Backlist
Pan Macmillan’s previously announced digital imprint devoted to backlist titles which they suggested would debut at Frankfurt has been renamed Macmillan Bello (supposedly for “hidden talent discovered and admired”) and acquired a marquee partner: Curtis Brown UK. The program will launch in November with 120 ebooks drawn exclusively from the agency’s backlist, with a further 400 titles to follow later next year. The launch list includes novels from Gerald Durrell, Vita Sackville-West; Francis Durbridge, D J Taylor, and Eva Ibbotson. “At Curtis Brown UK we have been researching the best ways to revive our authors’ out-of-print books, and were hugely impressed […]
Bowker Details 10-Country eBook Survey, and More eNews
As previewed at Monday’s Publishers Launch Conference, on Wednesday Bowker announced full details on the expansion of their consumer research into ebooks beyond the US and UK. They will conduct a new annual study, starting in January 2012 (for presentation in March), to chart the state of consumer ebook and ereading device use and acceptance around the world. They will gather additional data samples from Germany, France, Spain, India, Australia, Brazil, South Korea and Japan, in collaboration with companies including A.T. Kearney, the Book Industry Study Group, Pearson and Tata Consultancy Services. In other enews, Ectaco is demonstrating their JetBook Color […]
As Tablets Ignite Market, Children’s Publishers Share Tips at PLC
Disney Publishing Worldwide president Russell Hampton helped set the tone at the beginning of our second Frankfurt Publishers Launch Conference, Tuesday’s event focused entirely on digital change in children’s publishing. “We’re big believers in print and believe it has a lot of runway left.” But with digital opportunities, “we think for the first time we have a way to grow the publishing piece and…a way to do a lot of new things that we haven’t been able to do before.” Hampton said “the tablet has been a groundbreaking tool for those of use in children’s publishing” and he added, “believe it or not, the smartphone” is also “changing […]