The finalists for this year’s Booksellers New Zealand Industry Awards have been announced. The finalists in each of the categories are: Regional Bookseller of the Year (North Island) Paper Plus Masterton The Children’s Bookshop, Wellington Vic Books, Wellington   Regional Bookseller of

The shortlists for the Publishers Association of New Zealand (PANZ) Book Design Awards, including the PANZ Young Designer of the Year Award, have been announced. The titles shortlisted in the best designed cover category are: At the White Coast (Janet Charman, Auckland University Press), designed by Keely O’Shannessy

The League of Canadian Poets revealed the winners for its three annual awards June 8 at the LCP Poetry Festival and Conference in Toronto.

The Pat Lowther Memorial Award is given for a book of poetry by a Canadian woman published in the preceding year. The Gerald Lampert Memorial Award recognizes the best first book of poetry published by a Canadian in the preceding year. The Raymond Souster Award is given for a book of poetry by an LCP member published in the preceding year. Each award carries a $1,000 prize.

Pat Lowther Memorial Award
Song and Spectacle, Rachel Rose (Harbour Publishing)

Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
Notebook M, Gillian Savigny (Insomniac Press)

Raymond Souster Award 
The New Measures, A.F. Moritz (House of Anansi Press)

• Granta Books acquires Pussy Riot book
• Final BookExpo attendance numbers
• The evolution of high school reading lists
• Do writers with more than one child fall behind?
• Religious Booksellers Trade Exhibit is struggling

 

The New York Public Library will be hosting a special exhibit called “The ABC of It: Why Children’s Books Matter.”

Visitors will find this exhibit at the Gottesman Exhibition Hall inside the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. It will run from June 21, 2013 until March 23, 2014. Children’s literature expert Leonard S. Marcus served as the curator. Here’s more from the release:

The ABC of It draws on collections across the Library to present the literature for children and teens against a sweeping backdrop of history, the arts, popular culture, and technological change. The books and related objects on view reveal hidden historical contexts and connections and invite second looks and fresh discoveries. They suggest that books for young people have stories to tell us about ourselves, and are rarely as simple as they seem.

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When Patricia Payne, producer of the mini-series For The Term of His Natural Life, set out to adapt the classic novel by Marcus Clarke into an iPad app, she didn’t want to simply want to make an eBook. Instead, she combined the novel with the award winning miniseries starring Anthony Perkins to create an interactive eBook story experience. It’s not just an eBook with DVD extras or a film with bonus reading material. The app requires the viewer to both watch the videos and read the text to advance the narrative. The story includes a 300-page condensed version of the novel, alongside 18 video segments from the miniseries. The app is also loaded with other features to help tell the story including interactive footnotes, maps and historical documents, as well as  clips from the 1927 silent film adaptation of the book. continued…

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A number of publishing professionals made job moves this week.

Over at the Crown Publishing Group, Jacob Lewis will leave his post as Figment CEO to work as vice president and publishing director for Crown, Hogarth and Broadway Books.

He will report to senior vice president and publisher Molly Stern.

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Have you noticed a stream of diet-related tweets on Twitter lately?

You can help Twitter get read of these fake accounts with a single click. Twitter will block the fake account so they cannot follow or reply to your account. Simply visit the Twitter feed, click the “person icon” (image embedded above) and choose the “Report X for Spam” option. Twitter shared more advice about spam accounts:

 

Here are some common tactics that spam accounts often use: Posting harmful links (including links to phishing or malware sites). Aggressive following behavior (mass following and mass un-following for attention). Abusing the @reply or @mention function to post unwanted messages to users. Creating multiple accounts (either manually or using automated tools). Posting repeatedly to trending topics to try to grab attention.  Repeatedly posting duplicate updates. Posting links with unrelated tweets.

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Want to make prints of your Instagram photos? Printicular can help. The app lets you make prints of your digital photos and pick them up at your local Walgreens. And the app has a special Instagram format, so you can make 4×4 and 8×8 prints of your favorite grams without having them cutoff or weirdly formatted.

You can also use the app to print photos from your Facebook, Flickr, and Dropbox accounts, as well as from your digital camera roll. Once you select the photos, the app sends your order to the Walgreens of your choice and supposedly these prints will be ready within about an hour.

The app is available for iOS and Android devices. The service is currently running a promotion and you can save 25% off of prints with the coupon code PARTNER25.

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In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, Airbnb hosts were able to provide over 1,400 free or discounted properties as emergency housing to survivors. Since then Airbnb has been working on building the infrastructure to make disaster relief a natural part of the Airbnb community.

With the new Disaster Reponse Tool, Airbnb has teamed up with IDEO and San Francisco Department of Emergency Management to organize local residents who want to offer shelter in place while letting existing hosts provide shelter free of charge. Airbnb will also waive its fee for these transactions and email hosts in an effort to connect guests and hosts. continued…

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Tao Lin's latest novel could bring energy and excitement of Alt Lit into the mainstream literary conversation

Tao Lin's novel Taipei could, as Richard Lynch-Smith suggests and as I argued recently in Futurebook, be a game changer. What I want to do here is dig a little deeper into the "black hole" of Alt Lit and look at why crossover success for Taipei would mean a tornado of invigorating energy that stirs up a storm in the literary world and leaves it a richer, more nuanced place once the debris has settled.

In many ways, Tao Lin is a red herring. Arguably, he's no longer Alt, but in other ways he's the big thing. I'm not sure it's true that the Alt Lit community nurtured his talent and allowed him to rise from it. Tao Lin keeps himself somewhat aloof from the larger Alt Lit community, swooping down occasionally to cast just enough largesse to keep his acolytes happy, offering some the imprimatur of Tao's Muumuu House.

But Tao is not only the public face of Alt Lit, he is the lens through which Alt Lit is seen by the wider world. He has drawn up the tube map of Alt Lit and any prospective publisher will inevitably get off only when stops on the Tao Line are announced.

Which is a huge shame, because much of the most exciting work in Alt Lit – and the work the literary world at large most needs in order to be invested with new life – lies outside Muumuu's penumbra. Bret Easton Ellis is much quoted in discussions of Tao Lin. But one of the simplest ways to put it is that Tao Lin's books are little more than Less Than Zero, in which the drugs are ordered on iPhones.

As a movement, though – if it is possible to call Alt Lit a movement (I would say it may come to be seen as a movement for its uniqueness in making the digital world not just its medium but its subject, and letting the two iterate off each other) – Alt Lit is full of richness and energy.

One of the things I was criticised for in my piece for Futurebook was dismissing poetry. I did so because I wanted to look at the impact of Taipei on the publishing industry. And that really says it all. Poetry's place in a discussion of publishing has to be justified – it's a partygoer that'll be continuing to show its ID when it's drawing a pension. Arguably, however, what Alt Lit does best is poetry.

Whatever the success of Taipei, publishers and the media won't come beating a path straight to Alt Lit's most exciting poetry. But perhaps Pandora's box will be open just enough for all the Alt-evils kept therein to come flooding out anyway. I hope so, because Alt Lit poetry has the potential to deliver a shot to whichever arm performance poetry hasn't got to first.

At its best, the poetry of Alt Lit mixes three elements whose spread to mainstream literature would add extra richness. First, and most obviously, it engages fully with the digital world. Works such as Daniela Barraza-Rios's ♥ incorporate the rhythms, marks, and subject matter of the internet seamlessly – a far cry from Carol Ann Duffy's somewhat clumsy attempts to make poetry mainstream through text speak.

Second, Alt Lit poetry has a glorious confessional ecstasy that incorporates the primal screaming of the most vibrant abstract expressionist and the Beat poetry of the 50s and 60s.

This reflexiveness then shoots itself back out through Lacan's remade mirror in a moment of glorious jouissance – something that speaks to the one-dimensionality of some (but by no means all) performance poetry and the aridity and distance of much "serious" poetry. The finest proponent is Penny Goring, who uses words as fearlessly as Willem de Kooning slapped thick gobs of paint on the canvas. In fact, she utilises every tool afforded by the digital age to layer expressions on top of one another, image on text on video on reference on image until a 3D existential howl appears on the computer screen in front of you.

At the other end of the spectrum, much quieter but no less effective, is Paige Elizabeth Gresty, the salonista behind the first UK Alt Lit Spreecast party. Gresty is a video artist and poet whose tranquillity belies, and possibly even enriches, the complexity of her work, which uses subtle typography and image macros alongside more conventionally laid out texts to present a life gently being pulled apart by technology and disappearing down the optic fibres of fate.

Which brings me to the third element. Alt Lit poetry plays fast and loose with form, and is as much at home with image macros, screen captures and gifs as with lines of connected text. It is a movement that has taken the lid off the technological toy box and decided to have a proper play, pressing every button out of curiosity.

It is the willingness to borrow, copy, cut, paste, click and remix that may prove to be the most incendiary point of contact between Alt Lit and mainstream publishing. As long as image macros are reblogged on Tumblr, the precise images and text that have been pasted together playfully, creatively and pointedly go largely unnoticed. But if those who look after the rights of content producers make it their business to notice, the literature business might finally have the discussion about intellectual property that the music industry has been having ever since the Amen Break was sampled.

At what point is recycling the creation of something new – at what point does it cease being theft and start becoming a necessary part of progress? The mainstreaming of fanfiction has hinted at the question and perhaps it is Alt Lit that forces it into conversation.

All this hints at another box, outside of which remains Alt Lit. Head to the truly wonderful repository of experimental and Alt Lit The Newer York and you'll be hard pressed to find a .mobi or an epub file. This is a movement that produces ebooks as readily as it posts to Tumblr, but its ebooks are most likely to be read directly from a website or to be pdfs readable on or downloadable from Scribd.

This gives us a real freedom to integrate different media that would horrify many of the new generation of ebook authors, who fret whether they have the table of contents in exactly the right place for Kindles. And it might be this almost naive lack of awareness of what an ebook "should" be that finally helps to differentiate ebooks artistically from their paper-based cousins.

• Fiction
• Poetry
• Bret Easton Ellis
• Carol Ann Duffy
• Publishing
• Ebooks

Dan Holloway
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Legendary sports journalist Al Michaels will publish his autobiography with William Morrow, writing his book with Sports Illustrated executive editor L. Jon Wertheim.

In the video embedded above, you can watch Michaels talk about his coverage of the “Miracle on Ice” during the 1980 Olympic Games. Richard Abate of 3Arts Entertainment negotiated the book deal with executive editor David Highfill. Here’s more from the release:

Michaels has covered more major sports events than any other sportscaster, including 20 years as the play-by-play voice of Monday Night Football, and 7 years of the current #1 show on television, Sunday Night Football. He has also logged more hours (approx. 2500) on live prime-time network television than anyone in history. Michaels is the only play-by-play commentator/host to cover the four major sports championships on network television: the Super Bowl (8 times), World Series (8), NBA Finals (2) and the Stanley Cup Final (3).

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With the distinct possibility that no one from Random House will be put on the stand in the Apple ebook pricing trial, the documents depicting the publisher's discussions of different business model possibilities with Apple could take on increasing importance. As Apple's Keith Moerer testified on Tuesday, Random House was…

Jeff Tegge has joined Legato Publishers Group, the recently announced new distribution affiliate of Publishers Group West headed by former IPG chief Mark Suchomel, as vp, sales. Legge was formerly a colleague of Suchomel's at IPG, where he also had the title of vp, sales. Christina Quintero has joined Little, Brown Books…

Twitter and Portland’s data visualizers Vizify is teaming up to help you attract more followers with a highlight reel dubbed #FollowMe. Each video comprises of highlights of your Twitter hsitory including photos, vines, and stats documenting your savvy microblogging skill – like who you interact with and when you tweet the most.

Unlike Vine, #FollowMe doesn’t have a time limit. You can even add music from Rumblefish’s library of 1 million songs as you cut and edit the video to your heart’s desire. Once you’re done, embed them into your tweets to attract more followers.
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Yahoo is acquiring the photo editing app company GhostBird Software in a deal whose terms were not disclosed. The news comes as Yahoo has been on a buying spree. The company recently purchased Tumblr, Stamped and Summly, among other companies.

The company anncounced the Ghostbird Software news on its Twitter page earlier today.

Today we acquired @ghostbirdsoft for @flickr. Get ready to see your mobile photos in a whole new light! bit.ly/11zOvNY

— Yahoo! Inc.(@YahooInc) June 12, 2013

Ghostbird Software announced the news on its site, revealing that they are discontinuing their popular KitCam or PhotoForge2 apps. Customers that have already purchased the apps can still access them, but the company will not be updating them and they are no longer available for download in the App Store. Here is more about the news from the company’s site:

As photography enthusiasts, we are long-time admirers of Flickr, and we’re thrilled to be able to bring our technology and passion for beautiful photos to the Flickr team. There has been so much exciting progress at Yahoo! as they re-imagine their most-loved products for mobile, including the awesome new Flickr apps for iOS and Android.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Tired of your plain old Twitter profile? You can build a multimedia profile mixing video, music and images instead.

You can use Vizify’s #FollowMe tool to create a free Twitter highlight reel. AppNewser has more details:

Each video comprises of highlights of your Twitter history including photos, vines, and stats documenting your savvy microblogging skill – like who you interact with and when you tweet the most. Unlike Vine, #FollowMe doesn’t have a time limit. You can even add music from Rumblefish’s library of 1 million songs as you cut and edit the video to your heart’s desire. Once you’re done, embed them into your tweets to attract more followers.

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The Polaris Music Prize Long List has been revealed for 2013. We’ve used the Spotify app to create a free playlist of the albums on the Polaris Long List.

The prestigious prize helps introduce the world to creative new independent acts. Here’s more from Polaris founder Steve Jordan:

This year’s Long List is all over the map, but in the best possible way … A lot of our jury expressed that this was the most difficult Polaris ballot they’ve ever submitted. The results of this careful and passionate deliberation will make for some truly engaging listening for music lovers.

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A small number of communications from Apple's late ceo Steve Jobs have taken on great import in the ebook pricing trial, in part because Jobs cannot testify to what he meant. As we reported, on Tuesday the government showed a January 14, 2010 reply to Eddy Cue that "was draft…

Adding stickers and emoticons to your text messages has been around for a while through apps like Kakao and Line, but PongYo, a new iOS app from SPCNET Ventures, takes this a step further.

The app gives users the ability to create a customized avatar of themselves and use animations of these avatars to send text messages to their friends. Users can dress up avatars with different clothes and hairstyles to try to get them to resemble themselves and their friends.

The free app lets users send these animations to friends, along with virtual gifts like donuts, coffee, and ice cream. Avatars can even express moods like happy and sad. The company is working on updates to the app as well, and soon has plans to roll out a feature that will allow photo sharing.

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