BTW News Briefs

21,919 Industry Professionals at BEA

BookExpo America (BEA) officials have reported that 21,919 "verified" industry professionals attended last week's trade show at the Javits Convention Center in New York City. This is the first time that BEA has verified all attendees and exhibitor personnel at BEA.

The overall verified number represents the actual number of people who came to the Javits Center from every constituent base. Previously, convention organizers verified attendees but did not verify exhibitors, relying instead on a total "registered" number for exhibitors.

The number of verified attendees (all non-exhibitor participants including book buyers, press, licensing and rights professionals, non-editorial media, authors, film and TV production personnel, etc.) was 13,872. The number of verified exhibitor participants was 8,047.

For the sake of comparison, BEA noted that the number of registered visitors at the 2010 show was 27,211, compared to 29,923 at BEA 2009. Show organizers attributed the shortfall to the shortened schedule.

Above the Treeline Launches Edelweiss GeoSearch

On June 1, Above the Treeline introduced GeoSearch, a new Edelweiss tool that allows book industry professionals to specify geographic criteria to search digital catalogs for titles connected to cities, states, colleges, and universities across North America. GeoSearch is freely available to registered Edelweiss users.

The user specifies a starting location and a radius in miles, and GeoSearch returns all titles connected to locations within the radius specified. The locations are mapped with coded markers and the map is accompanied by a corresponding location summary in order by distance. Titles are also provided for the selected location. The search can be refined further by specifying filtering criteria that includes BISAC subject category, format, pubdate, publisher, tags, and more.

Treeline founder and CEO John Rubin said GeoSearch would help booksellers, librarians, and reviewers more easily connect to authors and titles of local interest. By summarizing the GeoSearch contents of approximately 30,000 title-location matches, states and universities can be ranked by author presence.

PBS NewsHour Features Industry Discussion on E-books

On Thursday, May 27, PBS NewsHour, hosted by Jeffrey Brown, featured a discussion about e-books and what they mean for authors, publishers, and booksellers. Featured on the segment, "Publishers, Writers Assess the Digital Frontier of the Written Word," were author Scott Turow, president of the Authors Guild; Jonathan Galassi, president of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; and Cathy Langer, lead buyer for Denver's Tattered Cover Book Stores and a member of the ABA board. The video and a complete transcript are available at pbs.org/newshour.

Turow and Galassi were also featured at the "Value of the Book" CEO Plenary session, co-sponsored by ABA and BEA, at last week's trade show. The complete video and transcript of the plenary session are available at cspanarchives.org.

Lambda Literary Foundation Names 2010 Award Winners

The Lambda Literary Foundation announced the winners of the 22nd Annual Lambda Literary Awards at a ceremony on May 27 in New York City, in conjunction with BookExpo America.

Awards were presented in 23 categories. This year's winners included:

• Lesbian Fiction: A Field Guide to Deception by Jill Malone (Bywater Books)
• Gay Fiction: Lake Overturn by Vestal McIntyre (HarperCollins)
• Lesbian Debut Fiction: The Creamsickle by Rhiannon Argo (Spinsters Ink)
• Gay Debut Fiction: Blue Boy by Rakesh Satyal (Kensington Books)
• LGBT Children's/Young Adult: Sprout by Dale Peck (Bloomsbury USA)

The complete list of winners is available at lambdaliterary.org.

2010 Arab American Book Award Winners Announced

The winners of the 2010 Arab American Book Awards have been announced by the Arab American National Museum. The awards, designed to draw attention to books and authors dealing with the Arab American experience, will be presented on Monday, October 4, at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C.

This year's winners are:

• Fiction: Master of the Eclipse by Etel Adnan (Interlink Publishing Group)
• Nonfiction: Angeleno Days: An Arab American Writer on Family, Place, and Politics by Gregory Orfalea (University of Arizona Press)
• Poetry: Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea: Poetry and Stories From Iraq by Dunya Mikhail (New Directions)

Two books in the nonfiction category received Honorable Mentions:

• Amreeka: Arab Voices, American Stories by Alia Malek (Free Press)
• Homeland Insecurity: The Arab American and Muslim American Experience After 9/11 by Louise A. Cainkar (Russell Sage Foundation Publications)

Awards, Above the Treeline, BookExpo, E-books, News - Books