New criteria for Frankfort E-book Awards

The International eBook Award Foundation, sponsored by Microsoft and other eBook hardware and software makers, says submission criteria for the 2001 awards will be slightly different from last year. In place of a single $100,000 Grand Prize, there will be one $50,000 prize for the best fiction eBook and another for the best nonfiction eBook. (The 2000 award was unexpectedly divided in this way.) In a tacit acknowledgement that many of the nominees for the 2000 Frankfurt prizes were simply digitized print books, the foundation has said that the winning eBooks must also include "Technical enhancements" that distinguish them from paper books. And to make the competition more inclusive, the foundation has lowered the threshold for eligible publishers to 10 books per year, down from last year's 20. Nominations are due June 30.

http://www.iebaf.org

Their never going to please everyone. Last year there was one group that thought the criteria was too stringent. That a publisher needed too many books to qualify. There was another camp that said the criteria was not tight enough, that anyone could qualify. When the awards were won last year by primarily large print publishers, there was a cry that the awards had been bought by "big business". The latest complaint I have heard is that "bells and whistles" do not literature make. I have to agree. It all depends on how you look at an e-book. Is it literature delivered in digital format or is it literature that takes advantage of all the technological "bells and whistles" at its command. I'm not going to take a side here. I think there is room for both.

In these days of intergration between print, video and audio, the definition of what is a book becomes hazier. I'm sure there was a time that printed books (a la Gutenberg) were looked down upon as lacking artistic quality, no illuminated manuscripts, no cuniform letters. I can remember the time when anything in paperback was considered less than a book - pulpfiction gets its name from the inexpensive paper they were printed on. Today most books (more than 9 months old) are available in paperback regardless of the quality of writing they contain.

We are at a cross-road in the production of books and as with most cross-roads there is traffic coming from all directions. Let's hope that there aren't any fatalities.

Microsoft Wins New Yorker eBook Titles, Looks to Future Devices

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