Book links round-up: a 140-character writing contest, Extraordinary Canadians onscreen, and more

• CBC to host first Canada Writes Twitter Challenge
• New CityTV series brings Penguin’s Extraordinary Canadians biographies to the screen
• Vancouver Island community to hand out books instead of candy on Halloween
• Man Booker Prize jury member Gaby Wood reflects on reading 138 novels in seven months
• Barnes & Noble loses a CFO but grows online offerings

E-book apps for Apple lose e-bookstore links

Big changes are underway in the e-book app world. Since Saturday, iOS (Apple’s operating system for mobile devices such as iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad) apps for Kobo, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, and Amazon’s Kindle have been updated to remove e-bookstore features and links to external online e-book stores such as kobobooks.com. The Google eBooks app, which has been available in the U.S. App Store since December 2010 (although unavailable in Canada) has been removed from Apple’s App Store and iTunes entirely.

The updates follow Apple’s weekend warning to Kobo regarding compliance with latest App Store rules. The Wall Street Journal (which will soon remove all purchasing options from its own app) reports:

Mike Serbinis, Kobo’s chief executive, said Apple told Kobo Saturday that it could no longer operate its digital bookstore from its Kobo apps and had to stop selling e-books directly through them. Kobo subsequently altered the apps so that they no longer sell digital titles.

Now Kobo customers who want to buy digital books via their Apple devices will have to visit www.kobobooks.com via Apple’s Safari browser to make their purchases, a potentially more laborious process for customers used to buying e-books directly through a Kobo app. Customers will continue to be able to access and read Kobo-purchased books from their library on various Apple devices.

Apple first announced the new App Store rules, which strictly forbid in-app links redirecting customers to online e-bookstores, in February and set a June 30 deadline for compliance. Apple’s enforcement of this policy comes as a surprise since the tech company dropped some of their original conditions last month, and the cutoff date came and went without much change to existing apps. From WSJ:

Apple in February laid out new terms for companies wanting to sell digital content via its devices. Apple said that companies selling digital media, including books, needed to make that content available for sale via an app, rather than through a link within the app to an outside website. As part of the change, which was aimed at giving Apple more control over the business, Apple said it would take 30 per cent of each sale.

In June, Apple appeared to relax those rules in content companies’ favour, giving them more freedom over pricing and selling their content. Apple dropped its requirement that any content sold outside the App Store also had to be available inside the store at the same price or less, with Apple taking its cut.

The updates to these e-reading/e-bookstore apps mean content providers maintain ownership over customer information and avoid cutting Apple into 30 per cent of a sale. Ultimately though, it makes purchasing e-books for Apple devices less user-friendly, which, unless Quillblog is mistaken, is a big part of the appeal of Apple devices and e-readers in the first place.

Kim Echlin wins Barnes & Noble Discover Award

Toronto writer Kim Echlin took home the big prize yesterday at the Barnes & Noble 2010 Discover Awards. The U.S. chain named Echlin winner of the fiction category for her third novel, The Disappeared (first published by Hamish Hamilton Canada in 2009), which follows the love story between a Canadian woman and a Cambodian man during the genocidal reign of the Khmer Rouge.

A jury made up of authors Peter Cameron, John Dalton, and Zoë Ferraris said in a press release, “The Disappeared is a powerful and affecting novel, one that’s willing to consider the greatest devotion and the most terrible cruelty.”

In the non-fiction category, David R. Dow, a lawyer and founder of the Texas Innoncence Network, won for The Autobiography of an Execution. The winners received $10,000 plus a year’s worth of marketing and merchandising support from Barnes & Noble.

Second prizes of $5,000 went to Eric Puchner for his novel Model Home and Rebecca Skloot for her book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Nic Pizzolatto’s debut novel Galveston, and Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, received third place honours and $2,500 each.

The Discover Awards honour “exceptionally talented writers” from B&N’s Discover Great New Writers program.  The 2010 winners were chosen from a pool of 60 “previously unknown fiction and non-fiction writers.”

The awards were presented during a private ceremony in New York.

Book biz round-up: Ian McEwen gets political and more

Book news from around the Web:

• Ian McEwen gets political during award acceptance speech at Jerusalem’s international book fair
• Barnes & Noble reports positive third quarter led by a rise in e-book sales, but still suspends dividend payment
• This one should get the hook: The Pirate Bay’s top-100 e-book list
• Hitchens, Franzen, and Smith receive nods for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
• Is this idea overdue? The rise of the e-book lending library

Amazon gives authors more reason to doubt themselves

Agents everywhere shuddered and screened their calls today as Amazon.com allowed authors to view their own sales data from Nielsen’s BookScan. A handy map of the U.S. highlights how many copies in each state have sold. From the L.A. Times:

The data, provided by Nielsen BookScan, include nationwide sales information from Barnes & Noble, Target and other big-box brick-and-mortar retailers, from Amazon.com and from some independent booksellers. Nielsen estimates that BookScan captures 75% of print book sales in the U.S. retail market.

BookScan’s sales tallies do not currently include sales of e-books, for the Kindle or other devices.

Authors who use Amazon’s Author Central will see a geographic sales map of books sold during a four-week window, with a lag of about a week. Early Thursday, the sales figures displayed included Nov. 1 to 28; later Thursday, Amazon expects a new week to load, so the information will span Nov. 8 through Dec. 5.

This is the closest thing to real-time aggregate sales data available to publishers, and it hasn’t been cheap. Nielsen’s BookScan, now a decade old, began to find widespread enrollment with major publishers in 2004, when fees ran $100,000 and more per year.

It would have been far beyond the reach of most individual authors, if it had been available to them.

Daily book biz round-up: Oprah likes Dickens; Atwood likes Wilkie Collins; and more

Today’s book news:

• Oprah chooses two Dickens classics for her book club
• PW names the notable newsmakers of 2010
• Borders may take over Barnes & Noble
• Margaret Atwood likes Wilkie Collins
• A new web hub for teenage authors is launched
• Natalie Portman wears Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, a handbag

Mark Twain: dead and kicking

As willed by the author, the first volume of Mark Twain’s autobiography was released for the first time on Monday, 100 years after his death. Yet even before its release, the Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1, landed on the Los Angeles Times, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble bestseller lists. The Globe and Mail review of the book says:

Twain hit upon a unique method for writing an autobiography: He dictated to a stenographer whatever was on his mind at the moment, sometimes responding to the morning’s paper or the morning’s mail, sometimes following seemingly random trains of thought wherever they led him, often interleaving relevant newspaper clippings along the way.

Twain’s publisher, University of California Press, planned to release 50,000 copies of the book, but has since increased the number to 75,000, reports another Globe article.

Daily book biz round-up: Canadians love Shilpi Somaya Gowda; Rumsfeld memoir due in January; and more

Today’s book news:

• How U.S.-based Shilpi Somaya Gowda came to dominate the Canadian bestsellers list
• NY Times takes a closer look at the high-stakes Barnes & Noble squabble
• Donald Rumsfeld memoir to be released in January
• A look inside an Iraqi bookstore
• The CBC chats with Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis
• Neat piece about the personal libraries of deceased authors

Daily book biz round-up: new Oprah pick coming; money for Ontario textbooks?; and more

Today’s book news:

• Oprah prepares to announce new book club pick, and it’s not Freedom
• Scholastic Book Club takes new marketing approach
• Dalton McGuinty makes vague reference to helping Ontario schools cover cost of textbooks
• Penguin sues sports writer over undelivered bio
• Century 21 scoops up former Barnes & Noble space before corpse is even cold
• EW uncovers shocking Hollywood prejudice: authors not asked to be on Dancing With the Stars
• Delightful literary oddities available on EBay

Price drop rumored for Kobo eReader

When it launched in May, one of the Kobo eReader’s big selling points was that it was one of the cheapest e-reading devices on the market at $149. But now, with Barnes & Noble selling the new wi-fi Nook for $149, and Amazon selling the new wi-fi Kindle for $139, the Kobo eReader – which requires a Bluetooth connection – suddenly has a lot less to recommend it. No surprise, then, that a Kobo price drop appears to be in the works. Though nothing has been announced officially as of yet, a current online-only piece in The New Yorker suggests that Kobo will be lowering prices very soon.

Reporting on a swanky rooftop party Kobo recently hosted in Toronto, The New Yorker had this to say:

Kobo is perhaps the scrappiest and most focussed player in the e-book war. Its online store has a vast and rapidly expanding catalogue of e-books that can be read on almost any mobile device (notable exception: the Kindle). And its own e-reader’s simplicity and affordability (it will reportedly be down to $99 in time for Christmas) has spawned a cult following. In Amazon’s rear-view mirror, Kobo is quickly gaining ground.

When asked by Q&Q to confirm the $99 rumor, Kobo vice-president of content, sales, and merchandising Michael Tamblyn said he wasn’t currently at liberty to comment on future pricing.