Ian Brown has won this year’s Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction for his book The Boy in the Moon: A Father’s Search for His Disabled Son. Taylor’s memoir is about his family’s struggle to care for his severely disabled son, who has cardio-facio-cutaneous (CFC) syndrome, a rare genetic mutation with only about 100 cases in the world.
Brown won C$25,000 for the Taylor Prize and last month won C$40,000 for the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. The book, published by Random House Canada, does not yet have a U.S. publisher, but that will probably change soon.
Other titles shortlisted for the Taylor Prize were John English’s Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 1968–2000 (Knopf Canada), Daniel Poliquin’s René Lévesque (Penguin Canada), and Kenneth Whyte’s The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst (Counterpoint).
****************************************
The buy buttons on Macmillan titles have returned to Amazon.com after a week-long absence. This comes after a full-page New York Times ad for Atul Gawande’s new book The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, in which Macmillan explicitly stated, “Available at booksellers everywhere except Amazon.”
Hachette Book Group USA and HarperCollins have followed Macmillan’s lead and decided to move to the agency model for the sale of e-books, too. This means that the publishers will set their own price for e-books in addition to releasing them simultaneously with hardcover editions.
In response to the recent buy button showdown (as well as other instances), the Authors Guild launched WhoMovedMyButton.com. Authors can register their ISBNs on the site and will receive emails that track the status of their books’ buy buttons on Amazon.com.
****************************************
The U.S. Department of Justice has released a 31-page opinion that questions whether the latest revision of the agreement in the Google Book Search Settlement is valid. One of the major DOJ concerns is whether the trade organizations on the plaintiff side, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, can speak for the entire industry.
The U.S. District Court in New York is scheduled to rule on the new revision on February 18, and the DOJ’s opinion could influence Judge Denny Chin’s ruling.
