Frankfurt Ebook Award Winners Announced

Posted on October 12, 2001

The International eBook Award Foundation (IeBAF) has announced the names of the winners for the 2001 Frankfurt eBook Awards, an award designed to recognize achievements in the emerging ebook industry. Selected from a field that included entries from epublishers, independents, large and small publishers alike, the winners were named during a ceremony at the Old Opera House in Frankfurt, Germany.

The Grand Prize of $50,000 each was awarded in Non-Fiction to Steven Levy for his detailing of the revolution in cryptography and its implications for privacy and safety in Crypto (Penguin Putnam), and in Fiction to Amitav Ghosh for The Glass Palace (Random House), a novel of love and war. The two $10,000 Distinguished eBook Awards went to, in Non-Fiction, Eric Nisenson for The Making of Kind of Blue: Miles Davis and His Masterpiece, a chronology of the making of a jazz classic, and in Fiction to Joyce Carol Oates for her collection of short stories, Faithless: Tales of Transgression. The Judges also bestowed a $10,000 Technology Award to Thierry Brethes, CEO of Mobipocket, for the company's cross-platform ebook Reading System. Special Citations were given to Francois Taillandier and Salvo Press.

To honor her achievements and in memory of Roxanna Frost, past Executive Director of the IeBAF, a special award was presented to a "publisher who has shown excellence in epublishing." The Roxanna Frost Award was presented to Fodor's for its Fodor's eBook New York City travel guide. The judges awarded a Special Citation to Salvo Press of Bend, Oregon, for the development and publishing of new authors in the ebook format. A second Special Citation was presented to the author of Intrigues, Francois Taillandier, for developing a work that is unique to the ebook format. Intrigues was published by Editions 00h00 in France.

"The judges found that the reading experience -- the reading of text on a screen -- was overall a very good one," said Judging Director for the IeBAF foundation Peter Mollman, a former publishing and software executive with World Book Encyclopedia and Random House. "Primarily in non-fiction titles, they found that reading ebooks actually allowed them to better understand and comprehend difficult texts, as they used the enhancements available in this medium such as: noting, book-marking, and searching, for example, to better follow and understand the author's thoughts and ideas."

2001 Frankfurt eBook Award Winners

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