For Immediate Release
Contacts: Paxson MacDonald
(804) 977-1747
Ethan Rossow (805) 965-5701
Charlottesville, VA (January 22, 2001) -- The Virginia Festival of the Book will host the first Independent e-Book Awards during the seventh annual festival on Saturday, March 24, 2001 at a luncheon sponsored by BN.com and Xlibris at the Omni Charlottesville Hotel in Charlottesville, VA. The awards are designed to recognize and reward talent in electronic books, hypertext and digital storytelling from authors and independent publishers. It is especially fitting that the awards be held in Charlottesville, home to the world’s largest public e-book library at the University of Virginia.
The Indie e-Book Awards will be part of Publisher’s Day which is held annually during the Festival. This one-day event of seminars and panel discussions showcases book publishing. The 2001 event, "The e-Book: Publishing and Promoting Books Online", is aimed at writers and small publishers who want to learn about the current world of e-publishing. The four featured programs will give attendees a strong understanding of e-publishing options, formats, trends, and will help jump-start their e-publishing efforts with practical and innovative ideas. Panelists will include high level representatives from BN.com, Xlibris, Amazon.com, PeanutPress, Booklocker.com, Mystic-Ink.com, Bookreport.com, and others, plus e-Authors, and a variety of industry insiders. M.J. Rose, whose self-published novel Lip Service was the first e-book discovered online by the mainstream publishing industry, will offer a program with Diane Zoi of Amazon in which they brainstorm promotion and marketing strategies for several of the participants’ e-books. David Seaman, Founding Director of the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia, will lead a program on e-book formats, reading devices and industry trends.
Background on e-Book Awards
The Indie e-Book Awards are sponsored by the Mystic-Ink Community (http://www.mystic-ink.com). Awards will be presented in eight categories and are open to authors and artists published by independent e-publishing houses or self-published authors (http://www.e-book-awards.com). Juror Jamie Engle, publisher of the eBook Connections.com web site, is enthusiastic about the contest because, "E-publishers have carved out a niche full of original books that step outside the mold." Another juror, M.J. Rose, says, "From the beginning, I’ve envisioned e-books as the great, new hope for both publishers and authors. There are vast opportunities…to debut and grow new authors, to bring back the mid list, to give real opportunity to authors who write between genres or for niche audiences, and for innovators who envision books becoming multimedia experiments." Some of the other judges include Jason Epstein, former Editorial Director at Random House and co-founder New York Review of Books; Charlotte Abbott, Editor at Publisher’s Weekly; and David Seaman.
University of Virginia’s Electronic Text Center
Open since 1992, the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia has tens of thousands of users a day from all over the world. As of December 31, 2000, the center had made more than 1,200 of their 50,000 online texts available as free e-books. The Etext Center is the world’s largest public e-library with more than one million downloads since the project was launched August 2000. "The use of our e-books is truly global, with users coming not only from North America, but also from Europe, New Zealand, Australia, and even a good many from Asia, Africa, and the Russian Federation. The enormous popularity of our e-book holdings does much to validate the concept of the e-book software as a reading environment," said founding director David Seaman. Seaman will lead a panel discussion at Publisher’s Day 2001 on the lessons they have learned at the center about what people want on the web and how they’re prepared to use the information.
The Seventh Annual Festival of the Book will take place March 21-25. This five-day free literary event offers author readings, panel discussions, workshops, informal conversations among writers and readers, and book signings—in all more than 200 free events at venues around Charlottesville, designed for those who love to read. Attending authors and programming events for VABook! 2001 will be listed on the web site as they become available at www.vabook.org. For more information about the Festival, call (804) 924-6890.
