2015 Literary Book Award Winners

The book award winners for 2015 are in. This post covers the Nobel Prize in Literature, The Pulitzer Prize, The National Book Award, and the Man-Booker Prize for fiction.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2015

The Nobel Prize honors an author “for outstanding contributions in the field of literature.” It is awarded annually. The past winners from the US include Sinclair Lewis, T. S. Elliot, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Toni Morrison to name a few; some heavy hitters in American Literature. The award is a big deal since only one author wins per year for a body of work.

This year the away went to Svetlana Alexievich a Belarus author and journalist. She was born in the Ukraine and writes about life during and after the Soviet Union. She was awarded “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.” What that means is that she writes many voices together at the same time in her novels and biographies. She mixes in reporting and interviews to create a collage of a wide range of voices. She is notable also for her criticism of political regimes in the former Soviet Union and in Belarus where she lives now. A very brave thing to do in a land torn by civil war and powerful regimes.

She has very good reviews on Amazon. Here are some of her works in English.




War’s Unwomanly Face
Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War
Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

The Pulitzer Prize

The Pulitzer Prize for fiction is awarded yearly to an American author writing about American life. Some past winners are many of the same from the Nobel Prize; Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway.

This year the award goes to Anthony Doerr for All the Light We Cannot See.

The National Book Award

The mission of the NBA is to celebrate the best American Literature, expand its audience, and enhance the cultural value of great writing in America. Some notable past winners include William Carlos Williams, Norman Mailer, John Updike, William Faulkner, and Thomas Pynchon to name a few. This award goes to a book and is presented to the author. Many authors have won for numerous books.

The 2015 winner for fiction is Adam Johnson for Fortune Smiles: Stories.

The Man-Booker Prize

The Man-Booker Prize while it remains relatively unknown in the US, is the major award an author can win next to the Nobel Prize. The award takes submissions from many countries and requires that the book me in English and published in the Commonwealth Nations, read former British colonies.

All the awards are a big deal to win, but this one is a step above because it includes many more authors and countries. Some notable winners include Julian Barnes and J. M. Coetzee, two great authors.

The 2015 Man-Booker Prize winner is Marlon James for A Brief History of Seven Killings.

This book also won many other awards and was included in numerous best of the year book lists. Marlon James is the first Jamaican to win the prestigious award and the first on this side of the pond, I believe. The book looks fantastic. It is a fictional account of an attempt to take Bob Marley’s life. It has been described as complicated and difficult, so bring your A reading game.



Those are the winners for the 2015 book season. Have you read any of these books yet? Let us know on our Kindle Literature Facebook page. Don’t forget to like the page for future posts.

Ebooks vs. Books and Other Fallacies Part 2

In the first part we covered the history of books and publishing. In this second piece we will address the fallacies and preferences that people tout about ebooks versus books. The final piece will cover the good of ereaders and how books and ebooks will coexist.

Fallacies

The first argument I heard against books was that they are hurting bookstores and libraries. Libraries have been around for a long time and many are now offering ebooks to borrow as well as other streaming services. Libraries are keeping up with the changing book industry and thriving. Bookstores have been going out of business long before ebooks came in the picture. If anything, ebook readers are book buyers which is good news for bookstores. Bookstores are also producing their own ereaders and selling ebooks on their websites like the Nook from Barnes and Noble. Ebooks are cheaper to store and don’t take up expensive prime retail space in the stores.

“I prefer real books.” So do people prefer the paper and binding along with the ink, or what was written? Personally, I prefer what is written. I read a lot, I read ebooks on my Kindle and iPad and I read hardcover and paperback books that I buy all the time. Reading ebooks does not mean you don’t read “real” books, or the derogatory term dead tree books, it means you are ok with the latest change in the technology of the book. Ereaders are making millions of books available to billions of people who could not afford them before.

“I like writing in my books.” As a book lover, I have finally started to write in my books, I treasured them for many years and did not want to ruin the ones that I bought. I tend to do more underlining when I read which is very easy with an ereader like a Kindle. You can highlight texts quickly and look up words with the touch of a finger. When I first starting reading a lot, I had to carry a notebook and a fat dictionary with me because I didn’t understand a lot of the words in the difficult texts. Now, I rarely come across words that I don’t know, but when I do, ereaders make it easy and better to look them up. You can also write notes in ebooks that will display easily as well as being able to print them nicely organized. The Kindle Paperwhite has a built in vocabulary builder that compiles a list of the words you look up so that you can study them easily, similar to what I used to do with a notebook, when I was working on expanding my vocabulary.

“Free ebooks aren’t very good, you have to pay for the good ones.” I would say the opposite is actually true. The free ebooks are the classics that have been available for years, and before ereaders. Dead author books are some of my favorites. That being said, when I first bought my Kindle I would download any free books I could find. I quickly realized that many of them were not worth downloading. I started being picky about the free books I downloaded to read. The classics, epics, and anything published before 1923 are in the public domain, which means the authors are either dead or do not own the copyright anymore and can be sold by anyone who decides to print them, or made available for free online. You can also download free ebooks from your local library’s website. See my post on Overdrive for more.

Project Gutenberg is a nonprofit that works to digitized, proofread, and format books into ebooks and make them available for free. Many of their titles are available in the major ebook stores, and can also be had by direct download from their site. Some of the best literature that has ever been written is available for free to download, so you don’t have to pay for the good books, they are all free.

“Ebooks have bad formatting and are badly written.” True! You might have to put up with bad formatting with ebooks at times. Many of the major bestsellers in the last few years did not have the best writing. Have you tried reading The Hunger Games? Everything that is published as a real book does not necessarily have good writing. Many of the people that publish ebooks are indie authors but there are some major authors joining the ebook market like Stephen King. Authors are switching to ebook publishing because their books will be widely available to readers and they get better royalty contracts from publishers like Amazon. 70% royalties are unheard of in the present “real” book publishing industry. Most authors make pennies from each book sold while the publishers make the majority of the profits. I’m sure Amazon is not doing this out of the kindness of their own heart but to disrupt the present market, in the meantime authors are profiting and ebooks are here to stay.

The quality of ebooks depends on the quality of the writer and the production team, same as traditional books. Terrible books are published by publishers because they will make a profit. We have book reviewers that read and review books for the readers to find and read. We need the same for ebooks. Websites like mine review ebooks and make recommendations and we need more of that. Most books that are published by traditional publishers are now also published as ebooks. The quality of ebooks will rise much like the quality of the novel did in the 18^th century.

The bad formatting and bad writing is part of the stigma associated with self-publishing, and has been around for quite some time now. The stigma has transferred to ebook self-publishing, and comments about the quality of ebooks are addressing this fallacy.

The latest bash on ebooks came in the form of a study published in Sweden that says that people who read ebooks retain less information that those who read paper books. There are serious issues with this preliminary study that had non experienced ebook readers reading for retention. The authors themselves address that the findings might be different with experienced ebook readers. The blanket statement is a subjective fact since all readers are at different levels. I am an English literature graduate student and I never have problems recollecting majors themes or plot points from either ebooks or paper books, but I also have more experience than most with books and ebooks. While this may affect some readers, the blanket statement has been adopted by the “real book” lovers as another reason why they won’t read ebooks and why we shouldn’t either. The people that don’t read ebooks did not read ebooks before and they don’t read ebooks now; why they care if we read ebooks is beyond me.

The readers resisting change justify their reasons and it comes down to this, they prefer paper books. That is fine! I am not going to bash paper books every chance I get because I might feel threatened. Read what you choose and so will I and millions of others.

The last fallacy I will address for now is that “a real bookshelf filled with real books is more impressive than a Kindle Fire loaded with books.” If you buy books to impress others with your book collection, you are doing it wrong. I have been buying books since I was a little kid, I own thousands of books in all formats, I have read many of them, and I have a Kindle collection with hundreds of books that I am working my way through. I do not show off my books, or my Kindle. I buy, borrow, and download free books to my Kindle to read, not to show off.

Thanks for reading and check back soon for the final installment of ebooks versus books and other fallacies.

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Ebooks vs. Books and other Fallacies Part 1

The ebooks versus books “war” has been raging for sometime. This frivolous and baseless war has been conjured up by those that want to maintain their current control of the book market, mainly modern book publishers, and those that are resistant to change. Ebooks are not going to kill books, or libraries, or bookstores, the same way that television didn’t kill radio and the internet didn’t kill television.

Ebooks are the latest advancement in book technology. Publisher mass produced books were the last major technology that replaced the rotary press and the Gutenberg press before that, and hand written and bound books before that. What people really mean when they say that ebooks are killing books is that they prefer things not to change. They prefer “real” books, those that are mass-produced by publishers that have been around for only 100 years or so, to the newer style of books.  

If you don’t have a Kindle or ereader click to check them out.



The History

To address this debate lets look at the history of books and printing. In 1440 Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press. Before that books, were hand written and so very expensive to produce and to own. Only the very wealthy owned books and they were also the only ones that could read.

In 1455 Gutenberg printed his first book, a reproduction of the Latin Bible. In 1475 the first book written in English was printed.

In 1534 the first publishing house was established at Cambridge in England, Cambridge University Press. The Press’s mission was “To further further the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.” Keep in mind this is still 200 years before the novel was invented in the early 17^th century. Being an Academic and educational publisher, they did not publish for general audiences.

It isn’t until 1639 that the first books were printed in the new American colonies. Followed by the first magazine being invented in 1663. In 1719 Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was written, which was the first and beginning of the English novel. This and many others were being reproduced in the US without any form of payment to the authors. We have always been rascals when it comes to stealing from other countries.

Many advances in printing technology later produced the rotary press in 1846. This made it possible for newspapers to increase circulation and the New York Times debuted shortly after in 1851.

In 1845 paperbacks were introduced in the United States leading to the Copyright act of 1891, which banned the reprinting of English titles in paperback, due to all the pirating of books.

In 1917 the Pulitzer Prizes were first awarded, following in 1918 with awards for Fiction, drama, and poetry.

James Joyce’s Ulysses was published in 1922 leading to the first copies of a novel being destroyed because it was considered obscene. This is also the first book in the Modern Library’s 100 best novels list.

This brings us to modern day publishers that were developed as “a purely commercial affair” that established publishing as a business. In 1911 the formal business model of publishers and presses was developed leading to the domination of book publishing by presses with a profit bottom line. This was very different from the Cambridge University press that was disseminating knowledge and was not profit based.

For authors to get published they needed to go through literary agents and publishing houses to even be taken seriously (another fallacy). A book published by these publishers was considered good quality, but that alone does not guarantee a good book. A self-published book does not guarantee low quality writing either.

As technology has advanced in book printing from the Gutenberg press, to rotary press, and now modern day laser printers, so has the book. As different genres were developed so did the book business models. What I think this all points to is that book technology, mainly the book itself, has never been a constant. The ebooks versus books war is just the latest resistance to the evolution of books.

The current business model has been in place for about 100 years and it is finally beginning to change; giving more power to the authors who can choose to publish themselves and reach readers through the internet and online book sellers like Amazon. The business models have changed from mom and pop bookstores, to major chain retailers, to online wholesalers making more inexpensive books available to the reading public.

Books, bookstores, and libraries are not at war with ebooks; ebooks are the latest technological shift that has taken place. Like most change, it is being resisted by people who are accustomed to a certain way of reading, and the businesses who have perfected their marketing and sales models to produce their profits. The large global corporation book publishers are fighting against the acceptance of ebooks, specifically with Amazon.com who is taking their monopoly away from them by having the control of the market and demanding better pricing.

Authors have always been able to self publish but there is a great amount of stigma associated with it. Arguments have been around for some time now like, if you can’t get your book published by a major book publisher then you must not be worthy of publishing. Publishers have a stranglehold on the book markets and control what is published and what is advertised. Authors without a foothold have a very hard time breaking into the market.

The publishing houses are businesses that are concerned with the bottom line. Whether the book is good or not is only a small part of the equation in deciding whether to publish. Whether the book will produce a profit for the publisher is the main consideration. Publishing houses do not equal quality or variety in books.

Major publishing houses have published Britney Spears's and Sarah Palin'sautobiographies, likely through ghost writers, because they would sell big, not because they were well written. Deals are made in the millions for the latest celebrities to publish books. If the publishers are supposed to maintain the quality of books published, then someone forgot to let them know.  

In the next part we will talk about the arguments commonly made against ebooks and why they are baseless. For the final portion, we will cover the pros of ereaders and how you can have both books and ebooks live in harmony together.

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