Red House Children's Book Award

Nominations for the Red House Children's Book Award close on 1 February.

The Award is made annually to the best work of fiction for children. Hundreds of books are read, short-listed and voted for by children from around the country and any child in the UK can take part. All you have to do is to nominate any picture book or novel first published in the UK during 2007.

The Award is judged entirely by children from shortlist to final overall winner. There are also 3 category winners:
* Books for Younger Children
* Books for Younger Readers
* Books for Older Readers
The top 50 titles each year are published as The Pick of the Year List.

Information from http://www.redhousechildrensbookaward.co.uk

2008 - National Year of Reading

2008 is National Year of Reading, officially launched at 10 Downing Street by Gordon Brown and Education Secretary Ed Balls.

Books are at the heart of the Year's activities but all reading 'counts'. Newspapers, magazines, poetry, song lyrics, screenplays and blogs will all feature as part of the Year's activities. The aim is to help build a greater national passion for reading among children, families and adult learners alike.

January to March in the National Year of Reading is for organisations to plan their activities for the year, whilst April to December sees the public phase of the campaign, with monthly themes.

However here at OLA I am starting straightaway, with a competition to write the plot of a book in rhyme. I’d be delighted to have entries from parents too.

Paperless books, 2

Can books be replaced? They are portable, simple to open and easy to hold. People love the feel and smell of them but in recent years so called e-readers have come on to the market. In Japan reading paperless books has already taken off: mobile phone users have been downloading books onto their phones for a few years. Companies such as Sony and Microsoft have launched devices, and in November 2007 Amazon launched its own ebook reader called Kindlle. It’s about the size of a thin paperback, and has no backlight, using 'electronic-paper' which mimics the experience of reading a book printed on paper, so making it more comfortable to read than traditional computer or mobile phone screens. It can hold more than 200 titles, from a current choice of over 90,000. Users can download a book in less than a minute and subscribe to magazines and newspapers. However it comes at a price, $399, and is only available through Amazon's US store.

Read more:
http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Amazons-Wireless-Reading-Device/dp/B000FI73MA
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article2904003.ece
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/nov/20/amazon.news

Paperless books, 1

The Universal Digital Library, a book-scanning project backed by several major libraries across the globe, recently completed the digitisation of 1.5 million books and made them free and publicly available.

The online library http://www.ulib.org/ offers full text downloads of works that are in the public domain, or for which the copyright holder has been given permission to make available. Having the backing of prominent institutions the collection goes far beyond the widely available classics.