Great minds

Our Fanfare choice Button Up: Wrinkled Rhymes by Alice Schertle and illustrated by Petra Mathers has been awarded the 2010 Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award. Congrats, Alice!

And now, to paraphrase Nicki Grimes on Jerry Pinkney, just give Petra Mathers the damn Caldecott medal, already.

How do you buy books?

I'm perplexed by Amazon's statement about their showdown with Macmillan, where, after pulling that publisher's print- and e-books from Amazon.com, they (paradoxically) go on to defend the free market as the best friend to the little guy:

We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books. Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it's reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book. We don't believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan. And we know for sure that many independent presses and self-published authors will see this as an opportunity to provide attractively priced e-books as an alternative. (from the Kindle discussion board)

So the idea is that if a book from Macmillan costs too much, a reader will choose a less expensive book instead. Really? Is that how we buy books? I can see taking a risk on a book that is cheap (the top five Kindle best "sellers" are not cheap, they are free) but I can't see wanting to read, say, Finger Lickin' Fifteen, and settling for something else because Amazon wasn't selling it (the situation now) or because it cost more than some other book. I do understand the bookseller's reluctance to allow publishers to set prices (although I also kind of wish I was back in Germany, where book-discounting is verboten, thus allowing independent stores to compete) but I'm not buying its logic. Unless--the reading culture of e-books becomes a completely different thing from that of print books, where you don't care so much about reading the new Janet Evanovich as you do for reading whatever the hot e-book du jour is, whose price might only be a buck.

Who will read about who?

Whom? I never get that right.

In either case, J. L. Bell has posted one of the smartest things I've yet read about color and reading. Much of the current blogging discussion about the "whitewashing" of covers, etc., assumes that if evil publishers and ignorant librarians would only change their ways and open their eyes they would see a world of unprejudiced young readers eager to devour books regardless of the color of skin on the cover or on the main character. But as Bell asks, do we know this to be true or do we simply want to believe it?

I've been working on an essay about the last ten years in children's book publishing (note to ALA: yes, it's coming, already) and while I can be as self-righteous as anyone about the cynicism of publishing, I can also see that the school and library forces that, in the past, informed a moral code in children's books have an increasingly small impact upon an increasingly small piece of the business. The gatekeepers didn't "make" Harry Potter or Twilight, they followed along.

On a related note, I laughed when I read a reader's comment about the Times report on the Oscar nominations: "'Urban drama' means there are black people in it, in case anyone was wondering. Come ON, New York Times!"

March/April starred reviews

The following books will receive starred reviews in the March-April issue of the Horn Book Magazine:

My Garden, by Kevin Henkes (Greenwillow)
Once by Morris Gleitzman (Holt)
Shakespeare Makes the Playoffs by Ron Koertge (Candlewick)
The Dreamer by Pam Muñoz Ryan; illus. by Peter Sís (Scholastic)
Revolver by Marcus Sedgwick (Roaring Brook)
The Last Summer of the Death Warriors by Francisco X. Stork (Levine/Scholastic)
A Conspiracy of Kings by Megan Whalen Turner (Greenwillow)
One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia (Amistad/HarperCollins)
Mirror Mirror: A Book of Reversible Verse by Marilyn Singer; illus. by Josée Masse (Dutton)

Count 'em, 669

Previewing the Spring 2010 print edition of The Horn Book Guide, that's the number of new reviews just added to the Horn Book Guide Online. Check it out.

Who Will Read About Whom?

Responding to the drama about Bloomsbury twice whitewashing a character on a book jacket, Mitali Perkins has a poll going on about how young readers react to covers with non-white characters. Go on over and cast your vote.

One thing and one thing only I want to say about the Bloomsbury covers and the call to boycott the publisher: Doesn't anyone think it's great that Bloomsbury is actually publishing books about kids of color where the color is not exactly the main thing? Okay, two more things: would Liar and Magic Under Glass have been published if their authors were not white, and would the covers have been the same?

How to fix BBYA

Liz Burns and Marc Aronson have been keeping an eye on the Best Books for Young Adults drama. That list is going to become strictly YA fiction; the Alex Awards (adult books of potential interest and value to teens) and) list will get bigger, thus picking up the adult book slack; and the new YALSA nonfiction award will publicize its list of nominations, thus theoretically increasing the visibility of nonfiction.

The reason given for the change is that too many books get nominated for BBYA and committee members feel overburdened by the reading. But if I have this right, only one committee member (or YALSA member) needs to nominate a book to get it onto that big list. When I was on BBYA back in dinosaur times, this nomination process produced some true stinkers, books that were only nominated because someone felt bad about not doing something for a book he or she got free in the mail. (Let's hope the nonfiction award contenders are going to be nominated with a bit more rigor if they are going to be publicized as recommended books.) Why not simply increase the number of nominations needed to, say, three? A book that has only one nomination for a choice made by a committee of fifteen is not going to make the list, so why waste everyone's time?

I also worry that the decision is shortsighted. The money in children's publishing right now is in YA fiction, aided by a now-passing boom in the teen population and an adult crossover readership, which will also pass once adult publishing figures out how to make even more money from these readers. At its best, the BBYA list displays the intersection at which YA librarianship is supposed to live: fiction and nonfiction, adult and juvenile, words and pictures (graphic novels are also banished from the new list and relegated to their own.) I think what the new system gives us is a bunch of bitty lists whose individual and collective power will be considerably diminished. It's similar to what happens when you have give out too many awards--whoops, that's another post.

Pictures from an exhibition

First up Kristin Cashore, sore but happy about her previous day, spent learning the TRAPEZE.











Mitali Perkins is convinced that social networking can sell books. She sure is good at it, too. (photo credit Judith Jango-Cohen)










Lois was really happy when I told her that the third Stieg Larsson book was available from amazon u.k.









M.T. Anderson doesn't eat broccoli because he likes it but because it is good for his writing. Plus--pass it on--he likes chick flicks.

Awards page

Kitty, Lolly and intern Shara have worked indefatigably to bring you the ALA Awards page, which lists all the winners announced on Monday and includes links to our reviews where available.

One more award

I was a member of the ALSC Distinguished Service Award committee this year, along with Cynthia Richey (chair, and a new friend), Joan Atkinson (an old YASD--yes, that old--buddy with whom it was great fun to work again), Peggy Sullivan (who I've known since library school), and Terry Borzumato-Greenberg (from Holiday House; the youngest person in the room but who I also feel I've known forever), and with great pleasure we selected Margaret (Maggie) Bush, professor emerita at the GSLIS of Simmons College, as the winner. I knew Maggie slightly before I came to the Horn Book in 1996, but once I was in Boston I realized she was the Zena of New England, sending generations of children's librarians out into the world to continue her good work. Congrats, Maggie!

Nikki Grimes said it best

“Give Jerry Pinkney the damn medal, already!" and I have to say I was never so happy to not be surprised. We are working on the awards webpage, with a listing of all the winners and links to our reviews, right now; in the meantime you can read my interviews with Medalists Jerry Pinkney and Rebecca Stead.

Our "Five Questions for . . ." series at Midwinter on Saturday went really well, good answers and large audiences and (except for a glitch when I interviewed the most tech-savvy of all, Mitali Perkins, so embarrassing) a working sound system. I'll post pictures tomorrow after I figure out how to get 'em out of the camera.