BTW News Briefs

ALA Announces Top 10 Most Challenged Books of the Century

According to the American Library Association (ALA), the top 10 most challenged books of the 21st century (2000-2005) are:

1. Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
2. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
3. Alice series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
4. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
5. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
6. Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
7. It's Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
8. Scary Stories series by Alvin Schwartz
9. Captain Underpants series by Dav Pilkey
10. Forever by Judy Blume

ALA noted that there were more than 3,000 attempts to remove books from schools and public libraries between 2000 and 2005.

For more information, visit www.ala.org/bbooks.

Sony Begins Selling Portable Reader

On September 26, Sony announced that its Sony Reader Portable Reader System is available at sonystyle.com and will be on retail shelves next month at SonyStyle stores, as well as at about 300 Borders stores. More than 10,000 eBook titles are available to download to the Reader via the companion PC software. Publishers providing titles for the Reader include Penguin-Putnam, Simon & Schuster, Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group USA, Holtzbrinck, Hyperion, McGraw-Hill Professional, Cambridge University Press, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, National Geographic, Kensington Publishing, and Regnery Publishing, among others. 

The Sony Reader, which features an electronic paper non-backlit display with on-screen controls, will retail for about $350.

APA Reports Increase in Audiobook Usage

On September 12, The Audio Publishers Association (APA) released a consumer study, Audiobook Market Survey: Customer Profile, Usage Patterns, and Experiences, conducted by Lewis and Clark Research, that profiled audiobook customers. The new data indicates that nearly one in four Americans (24.6 percent) have listened to an audiobook in the past year. The market is estimated at $871 million, a 4.7 percent increase from the previous year. In the 2005 results, CD sales made up 74 percent of format sales (measured by dollar volume). In comparison, CDs represented 35 percent of the revenue in 2002. In 2005, publishers produced a much smaller number of audiobooks on cassettes. Downloads represented 9 percent of sales in 2005 compared to 6 percent of sales in 2004. For more information, go to the APA website at www.audiopub.org.

Carl Phillips Receives AAP Fellowship

Poet Carl Phillips has been selected as the recipient of the 2006 Academy of American Poets (AAP) Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement, given in memory of James Ingram Merrill. The fellowship is awarded once a year to a poet for distinguished poetic achievement at mid-career and provides a stipend of $25,000. Fellows are elected by the Academy's Board of Chancellors, a body of fifteen eminent poets.

Carl Phillips was born in 1959. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986 - 2006 (FSG, 2007) and Riding Westward (2006). His collection The Rest of Love won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. For more information, visit www.poets.org.