Melville House Books

Late yesterday The New York Times caught up with the Quill Awards story that had been announced earlier in the day in an unusual early morning report from Publishers Weekly (see yesterday’s MobyLives digest). The Times report by Edward Wyatt, posted on the Times’ website late in the afternoon, said that the partnership between PW owner Reed Business International and NBC Universal Television “conceived the awards to try to remedy what has become an uncomfortable truth in the publishing industry: book awards are not selling as many books as they once did.” Wyatt reported that the resultant Quills Literacy Foundation would run the awards as a “philanthropy.” But that’s the opposite of what the Foundation’s head, Gerry Byrne, said in an interview with Michael Cader that ran earlier yesterday in Cader’s Publisher’s Lunch e-newsletter (unavailable as a link). In a note to MobyLives, Cader reiterated that Byrne “told me directly: The Quill Awards are a for-profit enterprise, owned and operated by RBI.” Cader’s earlier report also made one other observation somewhat contradictory to the Times report: while Wyatt reported that “most” of the annual awards “will be voted on by the general public,” Cader noted that to even be considered for the public vote, books will have to have been cleared by Publishers Weekly first by having been selected for review by the magazine sometime during the previous year. Meanwhile, an official website for the Quills has been posted at the website of New York’s local NBC affiliate. It announces that the Literacy Foundation “Executive Council” is “a select group of literacy-minded professionals,” although a list of members reveals that the council does not include any reading teachers, educators, or academics of any kind, nor any librarians, linguists, social workers or other apparent specialists in “literacy.” It does, however, include the heads of some of the world’s largest conglomerate publishers, including Random House head Peter Olson, Larry Kirshbaum, the chair of Time Warner Books, Bob Miller, president of Hyperion Books, and Jane Friedman, the head of HarperCollins. The board also includes Greg Josefowicz, the CEO of the giant Borders bookselling chain, and James Chandler, the president and CEO of the country’s largest book distributor, Ingram Books, as well as the heads of film studios, the editors of Variety and Parade magazines, and the head of the Advertising Council.

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.