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2015 National Book Awards Announced

The National Book Foundation has announced the 2015 winners of the National Book Awards:

Fiction: Adam Johnson, Fortune Smiles: Stories (Random House (USA))

Non-Fiction: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau / Penguin Random House)

Poetry: Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage Of the Sable Venus (Alfred A. Knopf)

Young People’s Literature: Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep Dreaming (HarperCollins Children’s Books)

Bookenfreude

From TeleRead:

I’d like to add a new term to the publishing debate: Bookenfreude. I’m defining this as: “irrational pleasure derived from any apparent misfortune for e-books, regardless of truth, context, or implications.” And I was inspired by Len Epps’s terrific summary of the state of modern publishing in TechCrunch, “On The Dark Matter Of The Publishing Industry.” (Chris Meadows has also covered the piece for TeleRead.) There, he waxes on Matthew Ingram’s evocation of “a whiff of anti-digital Schadenfreude” in his counterblast to the New York Times‘s recent thinly disguised puff piece for Big Publishing on the supposed slump in e-book sales. So I tried to go one better by summing up the whole phenomenon in one word.

Epps doesn’t exactly add much to our understanding of the Trad/Big Pub vs. Self/E-Pub debate, though he does articulate it beautifully. It’s not exactly news to say that traditional publishers are trying to trap the post-e-book world into the same structures and business models that were dictated by paper print publishing. After all, that’s just what Big Media has done in every other digitally disrupted medium so far. However, Epps does highlight how transparently false and self-serving Big Publishing’s arguments have become, even to relatively neutral observers.