Support for Quill Awards Program suspended

The Quill Awards, launched in 2005 to celebrate the best book in U.S. publishing, has lost the support of one of its corporate co-founders, Reed Business Information (which owns Publishers Weekly).

The Canadian Press reports:

Reed Business Information gave no reason for the decision and a company statement did not make it clear whether the awards had been placed on hiatus or ended permanently. A spokeswoman for Reed, which operates such publications as Variety and Publishers Weekly, declined to give any further details.

The Reed announcement, posted on the website of Publishers Weekly, said the plan was to “suspend” backing of the Quills, but also referred to the “dissolution” of the awards. Money raised for the Quills Literacy Foundation will be distributed to two non-profit organizations – First Book and Literacy Partners.

The award ceremony was a black-tie affair that has featured Jon Stewart and Donald Trump as presenters, and had been broadcast on NBC stations. The Quills Literacy Foundation, chaired by former Variety publisher Gerry Byrne, raises money to support U.S. literacy.

Excellent novel inspires excellent TV

In today’s National Post, columnist Robert Fulford declares his praise for an “excellent” CBC miniseries based on an “excellent” Canadian novel, The Englishman’s Boy. The novel earned author Guy Vanderhaeghe the 1996 Governor General’s Award.

The award-winning book, and now the miniseries, reveal a gruesome period in Canadian history that includes a massacre committed by wolfers (i.e., hunters of wolves) in 1873, known as the Cypress Hills Massacre.

The four-hour miniseries will air on CBC this Sunday and on the following Sunday, March 9, at 8 p.m.

A lasting relationship: TV, movies, and books

Film, TV, and publishing companies in India are hoping to cash in on the media-saturated youth culture of the nation, according to NDTVMovies.com.

It seems the books that inspire blockbuster hits in India see an immediate boost in sales, so entertainment giant STAR India has teamed up with Prakash Books to publish almost 300 titles based on TV serials this year.

In the article, Indian poet and filmmaker Gulzar puts it bluntly:

At a time, when youngsters are glued to Internet and television channels, you cannot feed them forcefully. We must provide what youngsters want to read.

Self-publish your creations while at the bookstore

Despite an unsteady book industry, The Guardian reports there is a growing appetite for self-publishing, citing the rapid growth of one of the first online print-on-demand publishers. Lulu, now five years old, is doubling in size every year and claims it publishes 4,000 new titles each week.

Lulu’s success has attracted traditional book retailer Borders to partner with it, and to launch a personal publishing program in 13 stores across the U.S.

In-store interactive kiosks will enable people to publish their own books-on-demand for just a few hundred dollars – though editing and marketing services cost extra. As for readers, well, what author can really count on those, anyway?

Oprah’s online freebie makes for good publicity

As the debate about whether to publish on the Internet continues to rage in publishing houses and ivory towers across North America, Oprah’s latest stunt is adding fuel to the fire.

Last week, author Suze Orman made her book Women and Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny available free on Oprah’s website for a period of 33 hours. More than 1.1 million copies were downloaded. Even so, the book remains a bestseller and ranks No. 6 on Amazon.com.

What the world needs now: more reading

All around the world, it seems, people need to step up their reading habits:

To cultivate a love of reading among Russian city dwellers, a Reading Moscow Train painted with portraits of characters and excerpts from classical literature will start running in May. Train carriages will also carry booklets featuring the latest books and magazines.

To foster a culture of reading in Ghana, one media consultant is urging the government to make reading a compulsory subject in school and wants every district to have a library and community book club. Accra newspaper Public Agenda reports that the consultant considers a lack of reading culture in Ghana to be a stumbling block for the country’s future.

And a recent study in the U.S. concluded that America’s literacy is in decline and that this will have “severe consequences for American society.” The report by the National Endowment for the Arts suggests people who read on a regular basis have better health, are politically engaged, and earn more money.

Curl up with a good mash-up

Advances in digital publishing have brought us to the ever-so-modern and high-tech production of what LibreDigital is calling book “mash-ups.”

The “mash-ups” are custom publications filled with content from several different sources and bound into one handy book. Using the eCompile Service, publishers can create custom publications for the truly demanding customer. LibreDigital is promoting their use for college textbooks and professional directories.

LibreDigital will announce the latest eCompile Service program at the O’Reilly Tools of Change Conference in New York today.

Reading for fun and profit

Remember the good old days when you walked to school uphill, both ways, and even read books for free?

Hoping to lower school dropout rates, the mayor of a small town in Spain has suggested paying students one euro for each hour they spend reading.

The town’s council will vote on the idea in March. The jury is still out on whether this will foster a love of reading or love of money.

James Frey and the Marlboro man

After being much-chastised for trying to pass his first novel off as a memoir, James Frey, author of a A Million Little Pieces, is preparing to release a new novel in May. Apparently embracing his controversial side, Frey has asked artist Richard Prince to design the cover for Bright Shiny Morning, Page Six reports.

Prince has been shaking up the New York art scene with his highly sought-after photographs of billboards, such as Marlboro ads – works that were originally created by other photographers.