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The winners of the 2012 Christian Small Publisher Book of the Year Award have been announced by the Christian Small Publishers Association (CSPA) (@SarahBolme).

Christian Small Publisher Book of the Year Award honors books produced by small publishers each year for outstanding contribution to Christian life. Book lovers and retailers selling Christian products voted on the nominated titles in each of 12 categories.

The winners in each category are:

Fiction
Yahshua’s Bridge by Sandi Rog (DeWard Publishing Company (@dewardbooks))

Romance
Hearts Communion by Marianne Evans (@Marmo212) (White Rose Publishing/Pelican Book Group (@PelicanBookGrp))

Christian Living
Walking in Broken Shoes by Susan Magnuson Walsh (Grace Acres Press (@GraceAcresPress))

Bible Study / Theology
The Disciple Whom Jesus Loved by J. Phillips

Devotional
Just Honor God by Dr. Rick Metrick (ShadeTree Publishing)

Biography
Mr. Awana by Art Rorheim (Grace Acres Press (@GraceAcresPress))

Relationships / Family
Deliver Me: Help, Hope, & Healing through True Stories of Unplanned Pregnancy by Dianne E. Butts (@DianneEButts) (Connections Press)

Children (age 4 to 8)
Today I Found God by Greg Long (@LaughALongBooks); Nathan Wondrak, illustrator (Halo Publishing International (@HaloPublishing))

Children (age 8 to 12)
What Do Heroes Wear? by Gary Bower; Jan Bower, illustrator (Storybook Meadow Publishing)

Young Adult (age 12+)
Purity’s Big Payoff / Premarital Sex is a Big Rip-Off, Donna Lee Schillinger, editor (The Quilldriver (@OnMyOwnNowMin))

Gift Book
A Second Cup of Hot Apple Cider, N. J. Lindquist (@NJ_Lindquist) & Wendy E. Nelles, editors (That's Life! Communications (@ThatsLifeComm))

eBook Exclusive
Keyboarding for the Christian School, Elementary Edition by Leanne Beitel (@lbeitel) (Christian Keyboarding)

See the awards site.

Also see our previous blogpost, “ECPA Announces 2012 Christian Book Award Finalists.”

And be sure to bookmark and use daily SomersaultNOW, the online dashboard for publishing and marketing professionals.

The US Department of Justice announced April 11 it was suing Apple and 5 major international publishers (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster) for allegedly conspiring to fix — and subsequently increase — the price of ebooks in a bid to “require them to grant retailers — such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble — the freedom to reduce the prices of their ebook titles.” Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster have since settled their suits (see Publishers Weekly, “The Broad Strokes of the Hachette, HarperCollins, and S&S Price-Fixing Settlement”).

Read the summary by The Wall Street Journal, “Publishers Seek to Resolve Ebook Case” and the paper by Knowledge@Wharton (@knowledgewharton), "Ebook Price-Fixing: Finding the Best Model for Publishers — and Readers."

Coverage of the news by The New York Times includes “Book Publishing’s Real Nemesis,” “Competition Needs Protection,” and “Cut in Ebook Pricing by Amazon Is Set to Shake Rivals.”

For an historical perspective on the matter, see this NPR commentary by Jason Boog (@jasonboog), editor of GalleyCat (@GalleyCat).

“This wasn't the first time the industry had needed a quick and dirty price fix. During the Great Depression, publishers faced off against another seemingly invincible retail juggernaut: Macy's Department Stores.”

On ZDNet, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes (@the_pc_doc) expands the topic and asks, “Should the DoJ investigate ebook DRM and hardware lock-in?”

“For example, Apple only offers iBooks on the iOS platform, so when one day your favorite iDevice goes the way of all electronic devices, you either have to buy a new device or lose your entire iBooks investment.”

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you navigate the turbulent seas of ebook publishing.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

The New York Times Media and Advertising (@NYTimesAd) section reports on a new public service campaign that seeks to help children “read by bringing together two collections of all-stars: a Who’s Who of literary characters and a lineup of well-known musicians.”

The twin gatherings of familiar faces and voices are meant to underline the theme of the campaign, “Book people unite.” The pro bono campaign is on behalf of Reading Is Fundamental (@RIFWEB), the nonprofit literacy organization founded in 1966.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you publish and market content for all ages.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

The Vancouver Sun (@VanSunReporters) features this photo gallery of bookstores around the world that have décor stunning enough to make them repeated destination places. If only more stores were as beautiful.

See all the photos.

See our previous blogposts, “The 20 Most Beautiful Bookstores In The World” and “20 More Beautiful Bookstores from Around the World.”

If you’re a book lover like we (@smrsault) are, bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Launched in 1996, AbeBooks (@AbeBooks) is an online marketplace where consumers can buy new, used, rare, and out-of-print books, “as well as cheap textbooks.” It’s a connection point between shoppers and “thousands of professional booksellers around the world who list for sale millions of books.

One way it markets its brand is through video; lots of video. It’s produced 140 videos so far and offers them on its YouTube channel. Here are 3 examples.

Also see our previous blogposts, “A Video About a Poster Masks a Bookstore's Promotion” and “The 3 Qualities That Make A YouTube Video Go Viral”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you produce effective videos for your brand.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Although many Californians who own Kindles, Nooks, and other e-readers love their gadgets, they still prefer books the old-fashioned way — on paper — according to a survey by USC Dornsife (@USCDornsife) and the Los Angeles Times (@usclatpoll).

Even with sales of e-readers surging, only 10% of respondents who have one said they had abandoned traditional books. More than half said most or all of the books they read are in printed form.

The pleasure of reading endures in the digital age, even with its nearly boundless options for entertainment, according to data collected from 1,500 registered state voters. Six in 10 people said they like to read “a lot,” and more than 20% reported reading books for more than 10 hours a week....

And age is clearly no barrier to new habits. Folks over 50 are embracing some new reading technology at about the same rate as younger people. Twenty-two percent of those ages 18 to 49 own e-readers; 20% of people 50 and older have them.

Read this in full.

Also see our previous blogposts, “The Next Time Someone Says the Internet Killed Reading Books, Show Them This Chart” and “Extensive New Study: The Rise of E-reading.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you publish and market content in either ebook or pbook formats.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

From Kottke.org (@Kottke) comes word that the Internet Archive (@internetarchive) is hosting a copy of the American Specimen Book of Type Styles put out by the American Type Founders Company in 1912. It’s an elegant 1300-page book showing 100s of typefaces and their possible use cases, as well as all the equipment, tools, and furniture of the printing trade at the turn of the 20^th century.

See this in full.

There's also a 1910 copy of what is basically the German version of the ATF book.

Also see our previous blogpost, “Font Pain and Poetry: So Much Depends on a Curve.”

If you’re a lover of all things related to books like we (@smrsault) are, be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

In the Personal Tech section of The New York Times (@NYTpersonaltech), Alan Finder explains why you may or may not be able to digitally check-out your favorite books from your local library; and, if you find them, exactly how to do it.

Five of the six major publishers of trade books either refuse to make new ebooks available to libraries or have pulled back significantly over the last year on how easily or how often those books can be circulated. And complaints are rampant about lengthy waiting lists for best sellers and other popular ebooks from the publishers that are willing to sell to libraries....

These complexities may only increase with the announcement [April 11] that the Justice Department had filed a civil antitrust action against major book publishers and Apple, accusing the companies of colluding in 2010 to raise the prices of ebooks [on this subject, see the Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly) article, “ABA Calls DoJ Ruling ‘Baffling’” and its other coverage]. In the meantime, though, if you can find the ebook you want in the library, it’s easy to check it out. You can browse a library’s digital holdings from the comfort of your living room at any time. You don’t have to go to the library to borrow a book, and even better, you don’t have to go there to return it. Books vanish from your device when they are due. And you can get access to a library’s ebooks from myriad devices, including e-readers, tablets, and smartphones.

You do have to learn one of the two basic systems. One is for Amazon’s Kindle, which works directly through Amazon.com and is the easier of the two. The other requires you to download software from the Adobe website, and works for other e-readers.

Read this in full.

For a historical view on the topic of libraries and ebooks, see Mathew Ingram’s (@mathewi) article on GigaOm (@gigaom), “Kindle Lending: Book Publishers Still Not Getting It.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you navigate 21st century digital publishing.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Alexis Madrigal (@alexismadrigal), senior editor at The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic), offers this chart of statistics drawn from Gallup (@gallupnews) surveys to show that book reading has not diminished with the rise of digitization; on the contrary, it’s expanded. Interesting!

Also see The Christian Science Monitor's (@csmonitor) "Ebook revolution: We're reading more than ever" and our previous blogpost, "Extensive New Study: The Rise of E-reading."

If you’re a book lover like we (@smrsault) are, be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Research tab.

In this article, Wired’s (@wired) Angela Watercutter (@WaterSlicer) writes how “with tablets selling at mind-boggling rates, book publishers are scrambling to figure out how to bring their ancient medium into the digital realm.”

Though the rewards promise to be great, the adaptation book publishers must make is far more complicated than that faced by the music and movie industries, which essentially needed to digitize their current products. Bookmakers must become multimedia companies — creating audio, video, and interactive components for their immersive, built-for-tablets offerings.

They also face a dizzying array of decisions brought on by evolving standards and platforms: Should a certain book come to life as a dedicated app, an approach that, until iBooks 2 was released, offered more flexibility in terms of features like video and audio on the iPad? Or should it be turned into an “enhanced ebook,” which will work on Apple’s tablet as well as Amazon’s Kindle Fire, Barnes and Noble’s Nook, and other devices, but must be re-created several times over to meet each device’s specs?

Read this in full.

Therein lies the rub: are enhanced ebooks a profitable return-on-investment for publishers? This is explored by Digital Book World (@DigiBookWorld) in Andrew Rhomberg’s (@arhomberg) “Some Tough Questions for Enhanced Ebooks.”

Also see our previous blogpost, “Extensive New Study: The Rise of E-reading” and Mike Shatzkin’s (@MikeShatzkin) analysis, “A feast of data to interpret in new Pew survey of book readers about ebooks.”

And then there’s the article, “A Billion-Dollar Turning Point for Mobile Apps” by New York Times (@nytimestech) tech reporter Jenna Wortham (@jennydeluxe) that, even though it focuses on the Web strategy of entrepreneurs and start-up companies, may have implications for publishers preparing ebooks and ebook apps for tablets.

The path for Internet start-ups used to be quite clear: establish a presence on the Web first, then come up with a version of your service for mobile devices.

Now, at a time when the mobile start-up Instagram can command $1 billion in a sale to Facebook, some start-ups are asking: who needs the Web?

“People are living in the moment and they want to share in the moment,” says professor S. Shyam Sundar, a director of the media Effects Research Lab at Pennsylvania State University. “Mobile gives you that immediacy and convenience.”

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you plan your strategy for ebook (as well as pbook) publishing.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.