Obreht’s win came as a surprise to many, including those U.K. bookies who had placed their bets on Emma Donoghue’s Room. But Donoghue won’t be returning to Canada empty-handed: yesterday Room was declared winner of the Orange Youth Prize. Six teenagers picked Donoghue’s novel from the Orange prize shortlist, which also included Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love, Emma Henderson’s Grace Williams Says it Loud, Nicole Krauss’s Great House, and fellow Canadian Kathleen Winter’s Annabel. Amazon.co.uk also declared Room the most popular, with 69 per cent of the shortlist’s sales.

The Orange prize celebrates “excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing.” The winner receives a cheque for £30,000.

The shortlist will be announced April 12 and the winners revealed at a ceremony in London on June 8. The winner receives a prize of £30,000 and a bronze “Bessie” statuette created and donated by artist Grizel Niven.

• Your e-reader knows too much
• Oprah’s Dickens picks not flying off shelves
• Sorry boys: Japanese cracking down on “extreme sex acts” in manga titles
• Orange Prize judges announced
• Room and The Imperfectionists make B&N Best of 2010 list

• Paperback thrown at Obama
• Adam Gopnik wonders what literary prizes are for
• Amazon launches Kindle Singles (not to be confused with Kraft Singles)
• Salman Rushdie to write memoir about years in hiding
• Orange Prize organizers drop award for new writers
• Emma Donoghue’s Room bookshelf

• Early iPad adopters exposed to massive security breach
• Barbara Kingsolver wins Orange Prize
• Atwood to headline Frye Festival in 2011
• Only female candidate for Oxford professor of poetry position withdraws from race, citing “serious flaws” in election process
• Some Kindle titles more expensive in U.S. than in Canada
• Better writing through not linking
• On the joys and perils of reading The New Yorker‘s fiction selections
• The top ten bathroom reads

• The New York Observer posts an excellent article about outgoing S&S publisher David Rosenthal
• Lionel Shriver slams Orange Prize organizers, Bret Easton Ellis, and publishing in general
• Apparently, teenagers like Anne Michaels
• Swedish publishers get all silly over unpublished short stories by a 17-year-old Stieg Larsson
• eBookNewser launches ongoing spotlight on online writers
• AbeBooks looks at 25 iconic book covers

• Having had its butt kicked by the major publishers, Amazon starts beating up on the weaker kids
• Harper government flip-flops on funding for Internet access at libraries. We think. (We had to read this story a few times…)
• Amazon releases beta version of Kindle app for Mac
• Stanza has disappeared from the Apple app store! Oh wait, no it hasn’t. Never mind
• Gerald Posner: dirty plagiarizer times two
• Some new Just So Stories
• Who’s at fault for the joylessness of the Orange Prize titles? It’s the publishers, stupid!
• U.S. library full of dead bats! City brings in “professional bat exclusionist”

• Mantel, Moore, and Waters make Orange Prize longlist
• Roy MacSkimming on allowing Amazon to set up shop in Canada
• Comic book and graphic novel retailers still waiting for better days
• Fast on the heels of Colorado dust-up, Amazon threatens Connecticut, too
• How Joe Hill climbed out from under dad Stephen King’s shadow
• Salon’s Laura Miller plays Book Critic Cliché Bingo
• The New York Times on the tricky business of archiving authors’ digital materials
• A contrary view of modern library design
• Kurt Vonnegut meets Rodney Dangerfield, and other literary film cameos

“I suddenly understood what fiction was for…I had to read books that I wouldn’t have necessarily read. I had to read them well and I had to read them in a short space of time. Back to back. Annie Proulx and ­Margaret ­Atwood and Beryl Bainbridge and Anne Michaels – boom, boom, boom. And I started to realise what fiction could be. And I thought, wow! You can be ambitious, you can take on the world – you really can.” – Andrea Levy, on judging the 1997 Orange Prize

“It’s important to note that we are not looking to the agency model as a way to make more money on e-books. In fact, we make less on each e-book sale under the new model; the author will continue to be fairly compensated and our e-book agents will make money on every digital sale. We’re willing to accept lower return for e-book sales as we control the value of our product–books, and content in general. We’re taking the long view on e-book pricing, and this new model helps protect the long term viability of the book marketplace.” – David Young, CEO of Hachette Book Group, in a letter to agents supporting Macmillan and the agency pricing model for e-books

“We are removing Amazon.com links from our website. Our authors depend on people buying their books and since a significant percentage of them publish through Macmillan or its subsidiaries, we would prefer to send traffic to stores where the books can actually be purchased.” – The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America

“Forlorn as this hope may be, I can only fantasize that at least you might read my letter through and consider the pleasures and prestige of being an author at Faber, the last great family-owned independent publishing house in the western hemisphere.” – Faber editorial director Lee Brackstone in an open letter to Morrissey requesting he publish a memoir with Faber