Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today's stories:
A new report predicts that e-book sales will not quite breach one billion dollars in 2010, but most certainly will in 2011. It's worth noting that e-book sales in 2009 were around $170 million, according to Jacket Copy [2].
A group of Swiss indie publishers have teamed up with a juice maker to feature poems, short stories, and book excerpts on juice bottle labels. (Publishing Perspectives [3])
Cambridge University Press partnered with Book Aid International [4] to donate a hundred thousand books to schools in Sub-Saharan Africa . (Press Release [5])
Random House has launched a literary Web site for film lovers, wordandfilms.com [6], that explores the "intersection of books, movies, and television." (Publishers Weekly [7])
Thirty-year-old Canadian author Johanna Skibsrud has won the country's most prestigious fiction prize for her debut novel, The Sentimentalists, which was published by small indie outfit Gaspereau Press. (Star [8])
Rebecca Skloot won the forty-thousand-dollar Wellcome Book Prize for her nonfiction book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. (Telegraph [9])
Library Journal [10] announced its first ever top ten list of the best fiction and nonfiction titles of the year.
Celebrated Romanian poet Adrian Paunescu died on Friday at the age of sixty-seven, "and the nation immediately went into mourning for the larger-than-life poet," NPR [11] reports. Thousands gathered on Sunday for his funeral, which was nationally televised. "God loved the Romanian people so much that he gave us this volcano of a man. . .who was born for poetry that flowed from his brilliant mind," said one national commentator and friend.