Penguin, Random House, Hachette, Simon & Schuster and other publishing powerhouses were among the winners at the second annual Publishing Innovation Awards, announced tonight in New York City at the Digital Book World Conference and Expo. Rapper and producer Jazy-Z won an award, too.
The awards highlight the best in e-books, enhanced e-books and book applications in 12 categories, including best children’s e-book, best non-fiction app and best enhanced e-book. The awards are in response to a need to create best-in-class designations. Members of publishing’s elite mingled with cocktails at the Sheraton Hotel and Towers in New York to commemorate the honors. Read more.
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“The Victorian Christmas app will take readers back to an era when families gathered in front of the fire after dinner to tell stories, act out comic pantomimes, and sing songs in celebration of the holiday season.“
“Nothing sounds more like the holidays than thoughts and images of a Victorian Christmas — even for the gadget people on your gift list..” 
“There are six categories of material here: Christmas Past, Drama, Music, Novels, Poetry, and Short Stories. And yes, you will find Dicken’s A Christmas Carol here (in its 1869 edition), as well as other familiar classics. But the adventurous reader will also find material written in Latin and French, and lots of unfamiliar and interesting published works..” 
“A new ebook app containing 250 titles on witchcraft and magic is now available for Apple’s iPad.Developed by BiblioLife, the Historical Library of Witchcraft and Magic app contains titles from some of the world’s greatest libraries..” 
“The high resolution digital images of the app simulate the experience of reading an old volume, unlike standard e-books, and recreate in color the look and texture of the original pages and bindings as well as any engravings or illustrations.” 
“…the App allows users to “flip through” 19th Century tomes including a contemporary account of the exhumation of Napoleon’s body, the memoir of a battlefield nurse during the American Civil War and an ethnographic study from 1884 of the gypsies of the Scottish Borders.” 
“Page through high-resolution scans of more than 1,000 19th-century English treasures in an app that’s only a teaser for what’s to come” 
“…the amazing app that the British Library has just put out, for free, formatted for iPad. 1000 books, fully and perfectly scanned from its 19th century collection. A treasure house of published knowledge, and occasionally of profound but enlightening ignorance, so valuable that until now it would have been beyond the means of an average person, or even a reasonably wealthy one, to have put together such a collection for themselves.“ 
