Awards

Dan Poynter has opened submissions for his global eBook awards. Now through June 30, 2011 (midnight, Pacific Time) you can enter your book in the awards. eBooks must have been released anytime before July 1, 2011.

The Global eBook Awards are open to authors, publishers, illustrators and photographers. The contest is open to English language eBooks from authors, publishers, illustrators, photographers, self-published or traditionally published, regardless of company size.

The site does not yet say who the judges are, but it does say that, “eBooks are evaluated as objectively as possible with scores on several items. Judging panels will consider cover design, content quality, layout when not straight text, originality, etc.”

Finalists will be announced July 20, 2011. The award ceremony will be held in Santa Barbara, CA, Saturday, August 20, 2011.

Follow this link to enter.

UPDATE: Entry fees

1–3 entries: $59. USD each. Normally authors, the copyright owner.

4 or more titles: $49. USD each. Normally publishers, the ISBN owner.

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

Thanks to digital books, it has never been easier to sample an award winning book. After a little bit of research this afternoon, we found digital samples of books by many of the winners of today’s American Library Association’s (ALA) Youth Media Awards.

Read about all the 2011 winners here. Follow the links below to read the samples in our literary mixtape. Over the holidays, we made similar mixtapes linking to samples of the Best Books of 2010.

Below, you can find samples for these categories: the John Newbery Medal for the most outstanding contribution to children’s literature winner, the Newbery Honor Books, the Randolph Caldecott Medal winner, the Caldecott Honor Books, the Michael L. Printz Award winner, the Printz Honor Books, the Coretta Scott King (Author) Book Award winner, the King Author Honor Books, the Coretta Scott King (Illustrator) Book Award winner, and the King Illustrator Honor Book.

Read more

At The National Book Awards last night, books were being celebrated, but eBooks not as much.

The New Yorker’s Andy Borowitz called the eBooks, “The bastard cousin of the print book” and Patti Smith begged the audience not to give up physical books. In her winning speech she said, “There is nothing more beautiful in our material world than the book.”

Of the winning books only two of them are available as eBooks. The Poetry winner Terrance Hayes’s Lighthead (Penguin Books) is available as an eBook, as is Nonfiction winner Patti Smith’s Just Kids (Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers).

The Fiction winner Jaimy Gordon’s Lord of Misrule (McPherson & Co.) and the Young People’s Literature winner Kathryn Erskine‘s Mockingbird (Philomel) both lack eBook editions.

While Amazon offers 101 books by Nobel Prize-winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, only one is available on Kindle. At Barnes & Noble, only two books by the Peruvian author are available as eBooks.

Earlier today, novelist Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Here’s more about Llosa (pictured, via) from the Nobel site: “[he was awarded] for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.”

Both Kindle and Barnes & Noble offer The Temptation of the Impossible, the novelist’s critique of Victor Hugo‘s Les Miserables. Here’s more from Booklist: “Vargas Llosa discerns genius in the French novelist’s artistic transmutation of such leaden terrestrial events into a golden utopian fantasy. Readers who cherish Hugo’s powerful novel will value this insightful study.”

The 2011 National Indie Excellence Awards are open for submissions. The awards are open to print and eBooks by self-published authors, small press and independent publishers.

Winners and finalists will be announced nationally in mid May 2011 around Book Expo America. Prizes include a national book publicity campaign.

According to the NIEA website, the awards are open to “all English language books that are available for sale online and off, both e-books and books in print.” There is a range of categories to enter, including more than 20 sections for fiction. For more information, follow this link.

The deadline for entries is March 31, 2011.

With tongue planted firmly in cheek, Melville House announced the finalists for its Moby Awards for book trailers. 25 trailers have been nominated in five categories, all of them listed below. The winner will be announced next Thursday night, May 20th, 7pm, at the Moby Awards ceremony. Click here for more info.

Here is the full list of nominees:

Best Low Budget/Indie Book Trailer:

A Common Pornography by Kevin Sampsell
The Electric Church in One Minute by Jeff Somers
Extraordinary Renditions by Andrew Ervin
I am in the Air Right Now by Kathryn Regina
I Lego New York by Chistoph Niemann

Best Big Budget/Big House Book Trailer:

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith
Blameless by Gail Carriger
Going West by Maurice Gee
High Before Homeroom by Maya Sloan
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Dawn of the Dreadfuls by Steve Hockensmith

Best Performance by in Author:

Gordon Lish in Collected Fictions
Dennis Cass in Head Case
Thomas Pynchon (voice of) in Inherent Vice
Daniel Handler in Kindle vs. iPad #10
Jeffrey Rotter in The Known Unknowns

Best Cameo in a Book Trailer:

Jon Stewart in I Am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil…
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Grandmother in Eating Animals
He is Legend’s Schyler Croom in High Before Homeroom
Deepak Chopra in The Karma Club
Zach Galifinakis in Lowboy

Least Likely Trailer to Sell the Book

Pocket Guide to Mischief by Bart King
Shark Hunting in Paradise Garden by Cameron Pierce
Shoplifting from American Apparel by Tao Lin
Sounds of Murder by Patricia Rockwell
True Confections by Katharine Weber

The Pulitzers were announced yesterday, as GalleyCat reported. To make your eReading life easier, we thought we’d link you to all the available eBooks of the winners.

Fiction: Tinkers by Paul Harding (Bellevue). Kindle. Sony. No B&N.

General Nonfiction: The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy by David E. Hoffman (Doubleday). Kindle. Sony. No B&N.

Biography: The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles (Alfred A. Knopf). Kindle. Sony. No B&N.

Last night, the National Book Critics Circle gave its annual awards to five worthy books at a ceremony at the New School in New York City. (This blogger is on the board of directors of the NBCC). GalleyCat was there, covering the event in real time. eBookNewser wants to take this opportunity to point you to all the available eBooks from the winners.

The fiction award went to Hilary Mantel for Wolf Hall (Holt), which you can get on your Kindle, Nook, and Sony Reader. Remember, too, that this is one of the books Apple features in the iPad unveiling.

The nonfiction award went to Richard Holmes for The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Pantheon). You can get it on <a href="“>Kindle, Nook, and Sony Reader.

The autobiography award went to Diana Athill for Somewhere Towards the End (Norton). Here are the links for Kindle, Nook, and Sony, where it’s very expensive.

The biography award went to Blake Bailey for Cheever: A Life (Knopf). Here’s Kindle, and Sony.

The criticism award went to Eula Biss for Notes From No Man’s Land: American Essays (Graywolf Press). There’s not eBook for it yet, but winning the award might change that.

The poetry award went to Rae Armantrout for Versed (Wesleyan). There is no eBook.

The Shorty Awards are given every year (this is the second year, actually) for Twitter writers. Last night, author Arjun Basu won the official Literature category the Shorty Awards Ceremony in New York.

As our sibling blog reports, “PRNewser editor Joe Ciarallo covered the event, delivering a report about the festivities on the on the Morning Media Menu.”

Press play on the embedded player below to listen.

Also, some Twitterers who might be familiar to readers of this blog also got community-nominated awards, including international book news guru Jose Afonso Furtado, who won the Shorty Award for the Publishing category.

Read the full report on the Shorties from PRNewser here.

[Image courtesy of PRNewser]

Video streaming by Ustream

Here’s a bit of last week’s news that we missed amidst all the CES buzz: the Nook was named the Best New Gadget at the Crunchies Awards. The Crunchies are annual technology awards hosted by Gigaom, VentureBeat, and TechCrunch; this is the third year of the awards.

Watch the archived livestream of the awards above. The Kindle for iPhone App was a runner-up in the best mobile app category.

Here’s the complete list of winners and finalists from awards sponsor TechCrunch.