Daily book biz round-up: Obama’s kids book hits shelves; Chelsea Handler gets own imprint; and more

Today’s book news:

• Barack Obama’s children’s book released while his predecessor faces plagiarism accusations for his own memoir
• Chinese website apologizes for selling pirated e-books
• Grand Central Publishing launches imprint for comedian Chelsea Handler
• The Guardian calls U.K. author’s sentence in Singapore “a disgrace”
• Diarmaid MacCulloch wins McGill University’s history book prize

Ontario school library funding comes through

Ontario’s elementary school libraries – and the retailers and wholesalers that supply them with books – can breathe a sigh of relief: a much needed influx of funding, promised by Premier Dalton McGuinty during the 2007 election campaign, has finally come through.

The initial influx of $15-million (part of a promised $80-million) has already been divvied up among individual school boards, with each elementary school in the province set to receive a base sum of $1,500, plus additional monies calculated based on school size. The libraries can use that money to buy books from a list of 73 qualified vendors, who applied to the program last fall.

The list of vendors was first due to appear as early as last October, and the delay prompted concerns that the funds would not be forthcoming.

However, agreements with qualified retailers and wholesalers began to go out last week, and the ministry expects to have deals in place by the end of February, at which point the school libraries can begin placing orders. (For now, the vendor list has yet to be made public.) Those agreements will be valid for two years, a ministry spokesperson told Quillblog, with the ministry having the option to extend the agreement by two more years after that.

Watch Q&Q Omni for more coverage.

Depressed economy not all bad news for publishers

The economic turmoil in global financial markets is making a lot of folks depressed (ha!), but it apparently hasn’t stopped one mega-publisher from handing out generous bonuses to staff. The same week that Houghton Mifflin announced it was temporarily suspending new manuscript acquisitions, Hachette Book Group revealed its holiday munificence. As Motoko Rich writes in The New York Times:

As first reported by Publishers Lunch, an industry newsletter, Hachette is giving bonuses equal to one week’s salary to every employee in the company, in addition to the regular bonuses for which staff members are eligible.

Hachette, which recently opened a Canadian office, can afford to throw a little money around. Its Little, Brown and Grand Central Publishing units publish superstar authors James Patterson, David Baldacci, and Stephenie Meyer, whose Twilight series has begun to outsell even J.K. Rowling.

Houghton Mifflin, on the other hand, publishes writers like Philip Roth and Günter Grass. It can claim literary superiority, but clearly doesn’t have the same clout at the cash register. In times of economic hardship, teen vampires are a better draw than Pulitzer Prize-winners.