In 1971, rules for the Man Booker Prize changed. The prize was no longer given retrospectively, but became an award for the best novel in the year it was published.

Since many books published in 1970 were left out of consideration due to the timing of the rule change, the prize organizers decided to recognize outstanding books from that year. “Recognition for these novels and the eventual winner is long overdue,” said Ion Trewin, literary director of the Man Booker prizes. The Lost Man Booker Prize is the third time that special recognition has been given in the history of the awards.

The shortlist will be announced in March at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival. The award recipient will be chosen by the public, then announced in May. The winner will receive a designer bound copy of his or her novel.

The longlist contains 22 novels, including:

Amazon.com and Macmillan, one of the six largest book publishers in the U.S., waged a battle this weekend over e-book pricing. Amazon did not want to charge over $9.99 for e-book editions, but Macmillan (and other publishers) wanted the freedom to price some of their titles higher.

As a result of the dispute, Amazon removed the “Add to Shopping Cart” button from all Macmillan titles on its website, including print versions. Customers can still purchase new and used copies of the titles from outside vendors through the site, however.

In a statement, Amazon said:

Macmillan […] has clearly communicated to us that, regardless of our viewpoint, they are committed to switching to an agency model and charging $12.99 to $14.99 for e-book versions of bestsellers and most hardcover releases.

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.

Publishers Weekly reports, “In the wake of the launch of Apple’s iPad device and its content deals with the big publishers, it has been reported that Apple and the publishers have agreed on prices of $12 to $15 for e-books sold through Apple’s forthcoming iBooks Store.”

Macmillan books will return to Amazon.com, but there is currently no timeframe given for the restoration.

Apple announced its new tablet device, the iPad, on Wednesday after months and months of rumors and speculation. Amidst all of those predictions were theories about what the new device could mean for the publishing industry. Now that the actual device has been unveiled, publishing industry types can now focus those theories on reality rather than letting their imaginations run wild.

According to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, the iPad will fall somewhere between a laptop and a smartphone in regards to its capabilities. It will be capable of combining text, photos, audio, and video on a 10-inch color display. It will allow publishers to keep the same sense of graphic design in their digital designs that drew people to the print versions.

The iPad will come with an iBooks app, which will support the non-proprietary ePub format for ebooks. An iBookstore will be integrated with the app. Books from four major publishers — Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, McGraw-Hill and Hachette — will be available when the device hits stores in a couple of months. Between now and then, of course, more publishers may be on board.

HarperCollins Publishers launched inkpop on Monday. The site, created by HarperTeen, is an interactive writing community designed to attract teen readers.

Inkpop had a soft launch late last year and has already blossomed to over 10,000 international members with submission of nearly 11,000 novels, poems, short stories, and essays. Each month, writers of the five Top Picks — the most popular works on the site — will receive feedback and publication consideration from HarperCollins editors and authors.

“As with all of our online consumer programs, the concept of community-building is aligned with our ongoing corporate digital marketing efforts to cultivate a two-way dialogue with our readers,” says Susan Katz, President and Publisher of HarperCollins Children’s Books. “Inkpop provides us with an interactive platform to engage directly with our audience, encourage a passion for writing, and discover new trends and opportunities in this growing and important community.”

There are plans to eventually include other creative outlets on inkpop, such as photography, video, and artwork.

Thousands of Sub-Category Pages Also Deployed Providing a Unique Organization of Authors, Contributors and Their Books

Nashville, Tenn., January 25, 2010 – FiledBy (www.filedby.com), the leading online directory of authors, writers, illustrators, photographers, editors, translators and other book contributors, today announced a significant expansion of its online platform into fifty main category websites (http://www.filedby.com/categories/), which include more than three thousand sub-categories organized by the book industry BISAC code structure. Information about authors, contributors and books published or imported into North America has been indexed, linked together and organized into the new category sites for easy search and discovery. This first-time-ever organization of authors by the categories in which they publish will facilitate a wide range of connections among authors and their readers.

FiledBy’s innovative category sites now provide a vertical view of authors and their work and further organize the activity of authors into the categories in which they publish. The new websites aggregate activity taking place on individual FiledBy author sites according to relevant categories and display the activity as authors and their collaborators customize their online presence with photographs, biographies, videos, podcasts, documents and  links to other locations like blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and custom author websites. Authors and contributors can locate their work, register with FiledBy, claim a pre-assembled website that already includes all of an author’s work and build an effective online marketing platform with easy to use tools. And now that the aggregation of author-related activity is arranged by subject category, FiledBy becomes an even more compelling place for an author to bring and share audiences.

“We launched FiledBy nine months ago based on the vision that discoverability of books and authors has changed forever due to the impact of the Internet and search,” said Peter Clifton, co-founder and CEO of FiledBy. “We wanted to provide tools that authors and their creative partners could use to easily collect and present authoritative information about themselves and focus on their overall social marketing efforts. To accomplish this, we had to first organize a vast amount of information around the people who create books, rather than simply display the books themselves. Now that information is also available through our category websites.”

“Being able to control, customize and extend this information easily is of increasing value to authors, their collaborative partners and publishers in a world where search dominates discovery and the delivery of digital content intersects with existing information about print books,” said Clifton.