Scholastic, Kids Can among winners at 2012 Hackmatack awards

The winners of the Hackmatack Children’s Choice Book Awards were announced at a ceremony in Moncton on Friday.

The awards recognize children’s writing in Atlantic Canada and are voted on by students in Grades 4 to 6 in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland. The ceremony wrapped up a week of author readings and literary programming for kids in Eastern Canada.

The winners are:

English fiction
Hugh Brewster, I Am Canada: Prisoner of Dieppe: World War II, Alistair Morrison, Occupied France, 1942 (Scholastic Canada)

English non-fiction
Catherine Rondina; Kevin Sylvester, illus., Don’t Touch that Toad & Other Strange Things Adults Tell You (Kids Can Press)

French fiction
Richard Petit, Ton journal intime Zone Frousse (Z’Ailées)

French non-fiction
Stéphanie C. Dubois, Le petit livre des affaires dégueulasses (Les Malins Éditions)

Library and Archives Canada to eliminate more than 100 positions

The Globe and Mail is reporting that the Public Service Alliance of Canada, the country’s largest union of federal workers, has given layoff notices to 235 of its members at Library and Archives Canada.

According to the article, not all employees who receive notices will lose their jobs, but 105 positions are to be eliminated. Details about those positions and the impact the cuts will have on specific programs have not been released.

Richard Gwyn wins $25,000 Shaughnessy Cohen prize

Richard Gwyn’s Nation Maker: Sir John A. Macdonald: His Life, Our Times; Volume Two: 1867 – 1891 (Random House Canada), the second volume in the two-part biography of Canada’s first Prime Minister, is the recipient of this year’s Writers’ Trust of Canada Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. Gwyn was awarded the $25,000 prize at the Politics and the Pen Gala in Ottawa on Wednesday night.

In a press release, the jury comprised of journalist David Akin, historian Charlotte Gray, and political scientist Janice Gross Stein praised Gwyn’s book as a “fully rounded and compelling portrait of our prime minster’s public and private life.”

The first volume of Gwyn’s biography, John A: The Man Who Made Us, was a finalist for the prize in 2007, and in 2011 was named one of the best Canadian political books of the last 25 years by the Writers’ Trust of Canada. Nation Maker was a finalist for the 2011 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction.

Nation Maker beat out Ron Graham’s The Last Act: Pierre Trudeau, the Gang of Eight, and the Fight for Canada (Allen Lane Canada), Max and Monique Nemni’s Trudeau Transformed: The Shaping of a Stateman, 1944 – 1965 (McClelland & Stewart), Andrew’s Nikiforuk’s Empire of the Beetle: How Human Folly and a Tiny Bug Are Killing North America’s Great Forests (Greystone Books/David Suzuki Foundation), and Jacques Poitras’ Imaginary Line: Life on an Unfinished Border (Goose Lane Editions). Each of the four runners-up received $2,500.

Tor, Forge to remove digital rights management from ebooks

Starting in July 2012, ebooks from Tom Doherty Associates imprints Tor, Forge, Orb, Starscape, and Tor Teen will be distributed without digital rights management.

The New York–based publisher, a subsidiary of Macmillan, posted the announcement on its blog on Tuesday:

“Our authors and readers have been asking for this for a long time,” said president and publisher Tom Doherty. “They’re a technically sophisticated bunch, and DRM is a constant annoyance to them. It prevents them from using legitimately-purchased e-books in perfectly legal ways, like moving them from one kind of e-reader to another.”

The decision applies not just to frontlist titles and new releases, but will encompass the publisher’s entire catalogue. The DRM-free titles will be available for purchase from the usual ebook sellers, as well as from retailers specializing in DRM-free ebooks, such as Baen Books.

Presses de l’Université de Laval launches e-reading app, e-bookstore

Presses de l’Université Laval has released an online e-bookstore and a free iPad e-reading app.

The products were developed by Nu-book, a Quebec-based digital publishing company, and launched last week. Presently, 213 iPad-ready versions of PUL titles (complete with separate ISBNs) are available through a special section of the publisher’s website and via the app’s e-bookstore.

In a press release, PUL editor Denis Dion explains the press opted for a branded e-reading application to ensure “customers receive high-quality ebooks that can be read in an environment that is user-friendly and entirely adapted to the content and nature of our works.” He goes on to list features available through the platform: “Our app offers readers a wide variety of practical tools to annotate their ebooks, perform searches, view enriched content, and organize their ebook libraries as they see fit.”

Slideshow: A Weekend with Jane Austen

Toronto’s Pride and Prejudice fans will don their finest gloves and gowns for A Weekend with Jane Austen (April 20–22), a three-day event that celebrates the 1812 Regency era with workshops, lectures, tours, and period costumes.

The event is organized by Karen Millyard, a dance teacher and academic who discovered a love of English Country Dancing – popular during Austen’s time – while recovering from a bone marrow transplant. Millyard, who runs dance events throughout the year and is an enthusiastic advocate of the activity, says it’s not just romantics and English-lit majors who show up at her costumed events. “We get a lot of computer programmers – my theory is that they’re attracted to the dance patterns. They’re very mathematical and balanced,” she says.

Millyard admits that there are people who are drawn to the events because of BBC’s 1995 Pride and Prejudice mini-series starring Colin Firth. “It’s possible that there’s a certain false gloss over it – we tend to romanticize the past,” she says.

Click on the thumbnails to see photos from Millyard’s Midwinter Masquerade Ball, which took place on Feb. 18, 2012.

2012 Arthur Ellis nominees announced

Crime Writers of Canada revealed the shortlists for the 29th annual Arthur Ellis Awards on Thursday evening at the Manulife Centre Indigo in Toronto. The event featured readings by nominated writers, including novelist Robert Rotenberg. Prizes will be handed out at an awards gala in Toronto on May 31.

The nominees are:

Best Novel

• Alan Bradley, I Am Half-Sick of Shadows (Doubleday Canada)
• William Deverell, I’ll See You in My Dreams (McClelland & Stewart)
• Louise Penny, A Trick of the Light (St. Martin’s Press/Raincoast)
• Peter Robinson, Before the Poison (M&S)
• Robert Rotenberg, The Guilty Plea (Simon & Schuster)

Best Non-Fiction

• Jay Bahadur, The Pirates of Somalia (HarperCollins Canada)
• Robert Fowler, A Season in Hell (HarperCollins Canada)
• Adrian Humphreys, The Weasel: A Double Life in the Mob (John Wiley & Sons Canada)
• Joshua Knelman, Hot Art: Chasing Thieves and Detectives through the Secret World of Stolen Art (Douglas & McIntyre)
• Steven Laffoley, The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (Pottersfield Press)

Best Juvenile/Young Adult

• Becky Citra, Missing (Orca Book Publishers)
• Rob Mills, Charlie’s Key (Orca)
• Edeet Ravel, Held (Annick Press)
• Arthur Slade, Empire of Ruins (HarperCollins Canada)
• Tim Wynne-Jones, Blink & Caution (Candlewick Press/Random House)

Best First Novel

• Norm Foster, Watching Jeopardy (Xlibris)
• Ian Hamilton, The Water Rat of Wanchai (Spiderline/House of Anansi)
• Fraser Nixon, The Man Who Killed (D&M)
• Sean Slater, The Survivor (S&S)
• Roger White, Tight Corner (BPS Books)

Best Short Story

• Catherine Astolfo, “What Kelly Did” (Northword Magazine)
• Melodie Campbell, “The Perfect Mark” (Flash Fiction Magazine)
• Scott Mackay, “The Girl with the Golden Hair” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine)
• Shane Nelson, “Beer Money” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine)
• Jas. R. Petrin, “A New Pair of Pants” (Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine)

Unhanged Arthur (Best Unpublished First Crime Novel)

• William Bonnell, Snake in the Snow
• Valerie A. Drego, The Rhymester
• Madeleine Harris-Callway, Gunning for Bear
• Shane Sawyer, Too Far to Fall
• Sam Wiebe, Last of the Independents

Best Crime Writing in French

• Guillaume Lapierre-Desnoyers, Pour Ne pas mourir ce soir (Lévesque Éditeur)
• Martin Michaud, La chorale du diable (Les Éditions Guélette)
• Diane Vincent, Pwazon (Triptyque)

Lawsuits allege ebook price-fixing conspiracy in Canada

The Globe and Mail is reporting that several lawsuits have been filed in Canada alleging that, like their counterparts south of the border, the Canadian subsidiaries of foreign publishing houses conspired to lower the prices of ebooks.

While there are, as yet, no reports of representatives from Canadian firms meeting in high-end restaurants to fix prices, the Globe reports that the publishers named in the lawsuits “included” the defendants implicated in similar cases in the U.S. and EU – namely, Apple, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster, as well as their Canadian subsidiaries.

So far, lawsuits have been filed in three provinces. The Globe has details from the B.C. case:

A proposed class-action lawsuit filed in B.C. Supreme Court by the Vancouver firm Camp Fiorante Matthews Mogerman alleges that Apple Inc. and a number of publishers engaged in a “conspiracy” to lessen competition and “fix, maintain, increase or control the prices of e-books.” It is the most recent of at least five such suits filed recently in courts in Ontario, Quebec and B.C.

It also alleges that the defendants or their representatives communicated secretly, in person and by phone, to discuss and fix e-book prices, in the lead-up to the introduction of Apple’s iPad, which can function as an eReader, in April of 2010.

In addition it alleges that the growing Canadian eBook market is highly concentrated, making it more susceptible to collusion.

The lawsuits appear to imply that, like U.S. consumers, Canadians were victimized by the slight rise in ebook prices when agency pricing was introduced in 2010; they don’t appear to allege that Canadian firms were actively involved in a parallel conspiracy. Still, it’s hard not to be struck by the irony of the last line quoted above, since the introduction of agency pricing actually made the Canadian ebook market less “highly concentrated,” not more.

But if U.S. consumers are getting their day in court, so should Canadian consumers, at least according to the lawyers involved in the suits:

“The U.S. case isn’t going to cover Canadian consumers. So it’s the same underlying facts, it’s the same consumer protection agenda, but it is for different consumers in a different country,” said lawyer Reidar Mogerman, who filed the suit in B.C. Supreme Court last week on behalf of plaintiff Denise E. McCabe, a non-practising Kamloops lawyer who has purchased a “significant” number of e-books.

Shit Girls Say scores book deal with Harlequin

Following in the footsteps of Justin Halpern’s Shit My Dad Says, the popular Twitter feed and YouTube series Shit Girls Say is the latest Internet meme to be turned into a book.

Created by Toronto comics Kyle Humphrey and Graydon Sheppard, the book Sh*t Girls Say will be published by Harlequin in October, almost a year after the series hit the height of its Internet popularity. By December 2011, it was nearly impossible for anyone with a Facebook or Twitter account to avoid the hundreds of knockoffs the videos spawned (including “The Inevitable Sh*t Agents and Editors Say”).

Today, the Shit Girls Say Twitter feed has over a million followers and the YouTube video channel has over 28 million views, although not everyone is a fan. Last year, Humphrey and Sheppard faced accusations of misogyny and sexism for their cross-dressing comedy.

Tosca Reno takes the reins at Robert Kennedy Publishing

Author and fitness maven Tosca Reno will take over as publisher and chief executive officer at Robert Kennedy Publishing in Mississauga, Ontario.

Robert Kennedy, who founded RKP in 1967 with the launch of MuscleMag International, named Reno as his successor before his death last week, Masthead reports. Reno, who was married to Kennedy, began her career at RKP as a columnist for Oxygen magazine. Since then, she has contributed to the company’s various health and fitness magazines and published 13 books under the Robert Kennedy imprint, including her best-selling Eat-Clean Diet series. Her latest book, The Eat-Clean Diet Vegetarian Cookbook was released this month.

From Masthead:

In addition to her work with RKP’s magazines and books, Reno has toured North America conducting health and wellness seminars [in] schools, companies, and other organizations. She has also spread the word of healthy living as a guest on numerous national television programs including The Marilyn Denis Show, Entertainment Tonight, The Doctors, and was the star of her own Gemini Award-winning reality show named Tosca: Flexing at 49.