Annual E-book Sales Near $1 Billion, Swiss Juice Poetry, and More

by Staff
11.10.10

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.

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)

Cambridge University Press partnered with Book Aid International to donate a hundred thousand books to schools in Sub-Saharan Africa . (Press Release)

Random House has launched a literary Web site for film lovers, wordandfilms.com, that explores the "intersection of books, movies, and television." (Publishers Weekly)

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)

Rebecca Skloot won the forty-thousand-dollar Wellcome Book Prize for her nonfiction book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. (Telegraph)

Library Journal 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 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.