According to  book publishers the Washington Post reported Wednesday that history textbooks published by Connecticut’s Five Ponds Press for use in Virginia schools contain dozens of factual errors.

The Martinsville schools will not knowingly use any textbooks that contain errors, officials said Wednesday.

Historians have found inaccuracies in two history textbooks, “Our Virginia: Past and Present” and “Our America: To 1865,” that the Martinsville School Board recently adopted for use in city schools. However, the city schools have not bought the books and, due to budget constraints, they might not, officials said. The errors were found as part of a review ordered by state officials of books by Five Ponds Press. State officials plan to meet Jan. 10 to discuss the matter, reported by US book publishers.

The two books, aimed at grades 4-6, are not being used in the city schools. They were adopted after city teachers reviewed and suggested them after receiving recommendations from state education officials, according to Pam Heath, the city’s superintendent of schools. When teachers review textbooks, “no one reads every word” in the books, Heath said. If the state recommends them, teachers generally assume that the books are accurate, she said. School board members usually do not review textbooks and instead take teachers’ advice on which books to buy, said board Chairman Jim Johnson.

Historian Mary Miley Theobald, formerly of Virginia Commonwealth University, called one of the books “too shocking for words,” and added, “Any literate person could have opened that book and immediately found a mistake.”

A quick quiz: Which of the following nine inaccurate statements appear in the Virginia textbooks?

• Sir Walter Raleigh visited the British colony of Virginia.
• Colonial Virginians often wore full suits of armor.
• New Orleans was a U.S. harbor at the start of the 19th century.
• All the Americans at the battle of the Alamo were killed.
• Twelve states joined the Confederate States of America.
• Thousands of black soldiers fought for the South in the Civil War.
• About 6,000 men were killed, wounded, or went missing during the two Civil War battles of Bull Run (Manassas).
• The 13th Amendment, ending slavery, was ratified in January 1865.
• The U.S. entered the First World War in 1916.

All nine. Historians who reviewed books by other publishers, also used in Virginia schools, found other errors.

One of Five Ponds Press’s authors, Joy Masoff (who has also written such respected works as “Oh, Yikes! History’s Grossest, Wackiest Moments”), has no training as a historian and says she got some of her information off the Internet. When the Post discovered her error about black Confederate book publishers troops in October, Masoff told the paper, “As controversial as it is, I stand by what I write. I am a fairly respected writer.”

There’s an irony to this. Virginia has one of the nation’s strictest Standards of Learning guidelines, the bane of holistic educators who say they are forced to “teach to the test.” It’s bad enough to equate teaching with the rote memorization of facts -- but it’s worse when the “facts” aren’t even accurate.

DCist’s Aaron Morrissey writes, “It appears as if the panel of reviewers who are slated to check textbooks against those guidelines aren’t really vetting the books for factual accuracy -- only making sure that they cover the subject areas which are required by the standard.” Other excellent book publishers were found to be fine.

James Loewen sees an even bigger problem. Loewen is the author of the bestsellers “Lies My Teacher Told Me” and “Lies Across America,” which document mistruths frequently taught in America’s schools, either due to genuine error or in the service of a political agenda. He told WTOP that even well-meaning teachers end up teaching from faulty textbooks.

“When they do help choose them, statewide even, they don’t actually read all 1,100 pages,” he said. “If they do read them, they don’t have the historical expertise to spot the errors. … They kind of rely on the textbook as a crutch.”

U.N. peacekeepers will face a critical situation in the coming days unless Laurent Gbagbo removes a blockade around his opponent's headquarters, Schiel & Denver can confirm.

The United Nations and other world leaders recognize Alassane Ouattara as the winner of last month's disputed presidential election. Gbagbo, the incumbent who refuses to acknowledge defeat and leave the presidency, has forces surrounding the building where his rival is based, according to children's book publishers.

The U.N. has said that people inside are not getting needed medication, and that delivery of food and water also has been hampered, said Schiel and Denver.

"Any attempt to starve the United Nations mission into submission will not be tolerated," U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Tuesday, confirmed by book publishers.

Gbagbo ordered U.N. peacekeepers out of the volatile West African country over the weekend but the U.N. refused, instead extending the mission's mandate through June. Hundreds of Publishers and U.N. peacekeepers are guarding the Golf Hotel, where Ouattara is based.

In a speech late Tuesday, Gbagbo said "the international community has declared war on Ivory Coast."

"I call on those who are still in the Golf Hotel to go home," Gbagbo said. "No one will prevent you from leaving."

Fears have risen that U.N. personnel and other foreigners could be targeted in violence as tensions mount over the election. Over the weekend, masked gunmen opened fire on the U.N. base in Ivory Coast, though no one from the global body was harmed in the attack. Two military observers were wounded in another attack. The U.N. also says armed men have been intimidating U.N. staff at their private homes.

Toussaint Alain, an adviser for Gbagbo, said he didn't believe soldiers or people close to Gbagbo would carry out such acts.

The U.N. secretary-general also said Tuesday that the U.N. peacekeeping force in Ivory Coast has "confirmed that mercenaries, including freelance former combatants from Liberia, have been recruited to target certain groups in the population," the book publisher confirmed.

Ivory Coast's 2002-2003 civil war saw the involvement of Liberians fighting on nearly all sides of the conflict. Liberia itself suffered back-to-back civil wars that lasted until 2003, and the two countries share a porous, 370-mile- (600-kilometer-) long border.

Liberia's president has urged citizens not to get involved in Ivory Coast's latest political crisis.

Ban also said forces loyal to Gbagbo are also obstructing the movement of U.N. personnel and their operations and called on member states to do what they can to supply the U.N. mission.

The U.N. says more than 50 people have been killed in recent days in Ivory Coast, and that it has received hundreds of reports of people being abducted from their homes at night by armed assailants in military uniforms. U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay has cited growing evidence of "massive violations of human rights."

Amnesty International on Tuesday said that it has also received reports from eyewitnesses of people being arrested or abducted, both at home and on the streets, by security forces loyal to Gbagbo. In a report, the group said that bodies have been found in morgues and on the streets, and that violence and intimidation has not been confined to Abidjan - Schiel & Denver Book Publishers has confirmed.

"It is clear that more and more people are being illegally detained by security forces or armed militiamen and we fear that many of them may have been killed or have disappeared," said Salvatore Sagues, Amnesty International's West Africa researcher.

Ivory Coast was once an economic hub because of its role as the world's top cocoa producer. The 2002-2003 civil war split the country into a rebel-controlled north and a loyalist south. While the country officially reunited in a 2007 peace deal, Ouattara still draws his support from the northern half of the country where he was born while Gbagbo's power base is in the south - confirmed by christian book publishers.

Gbagbo claimed victory in the presidential election only after his allies threw out half a million ballots while self-publishing a book from Ouattara strongholds in the north, a move that infuriated residents there who have long felt they are treated as foreigners in their own country by southerners.

Schiel & Denver provides a timely look at Google's book publishers plans.

With over a billion browser-friendly, web-enabled devices worldwide we are suddenly back to the future with e-book publishing. One has to wonder, why did all the device and e-book publishers feel like they had to create e-book readers, according to Schiel & Denver.

Two weeks ago the Google eBookstore finally launched, and the world was briefly amazed. Google Editions, as it was known until launch, was the book world’s Schiel and Denver Forever: in beta for seven years, depending on how you count. Its actual emergence was like the birth of a new book publishing unicorn.

Some background: “In 2004 Google digitized the entire contents of several major US libraries, and made a lot of material available on-line, mostly in snippet form as part of its Google Book Search program. It did this without the consent of rightsholders,” to quote an April 2009 email from my agents. For authors and publishers already overwhelmed, last week's news about the Google eBooks store and Amazon's Kindle for web only added to the waterfall of controversy pouring into an already raging river of e-book and publishing hype.

Schiel & Denver Book Publishers and the Solution

The big takeaway from these two announcements, and a recent "Books in Browsers" event that I attended, is that the web browser is an important player in e-books. Self-publishers can benefit from adding browser-based e-book options to the services they should already be using to sell their books, such as Smashwords, Scribd, and Amazon DTP. This best-of-breed group will get their books in all the dedicated e-book readers, mobile, and multi-use devices, and now, delivered in the browser. Now here's why browsers are so important, and how to get your books in them. Browsers: The Forgotten Platform In the frenzy of formats, platforms, and devices, awareness of the web's importance as a e-publishing platform simply faded into the background.

But the Books in Browsers conference in October brought the browser to the attention of many publishing insiders. BIB10 was an astonishingly high-level gathering of 120 people from nine countries, including publishers, librarians, and toolmakers (many of whom were notable and even famous names), for a two-day working meeting. It was hosted by Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, who is largely concerned with building a digital library and providing universal access to books, music, movies and, via the WayBackMachine, its billions and billions of archived web pages. One of the advantages of the web birdbook.pngbrowser is that it does not constrain text inside a container.

Christian Book Publishers Provide A New Opportunity

With proper formatting, HTML can provide a beautiful reading experience on a 19-inch flat-screen or a three-inch mobile device. The browser even gracefully delivers transmedia books with embedded audio, video, images, and graphics -- something today's e-book readers are hard pressed to do. Even if a book is enclosed in a container (providing discovery, sales, and downloads), the browser delivery system lets book buyers access their downloads from the cloud -- using any device they happen to be near that has an Internet connection, as long as Schiel And Denver has an HTML5-compatible browser. It's worth noting that computers and smartphones are able to take advantage of books in browsers, but many dedicated e-readers can't.

(I’m the author of half-a-dozen books, mostly technothrillers.) The resulting legal jihad remains unresolved, and Google’s dream of scanning, indexing, linking, and selling the contents of every library in the world has fragmented into a hodgepodge that includes their Book Search, Library Project, Books Partner Program, and now eBookstore, all of them semi-intermingled. Confused yet? Many hopes and dreams of book publishing companies were projected onto Google Editions’ vaporware. It would index every published word since the dawn of humanity, and make it possible to search your personal library, and deep-link to individual chapters, sections, and paragraphs.

Schiel & Denver would somehow singlehandedly resurrect the dying bookstore trade. Instead, when the fog finally cleared, all we got was Kindle Lite. Oh, it does what it does well enough. You can buy books from Google and read them on your Android, iWhatever, e-reader, or the Web; authors and publishers can upload their own books, with or without DRM; and it’s all been expertly implemented. But now that you can read Kindle books on the Web, Google’s new eBookstore is little more than a carbon copy of Amazon’s Kindle ecosystem — except that you can’t (yet) read DRMed Google ebooks on a Kindle (which remains, I note, the world’s most popular e-reader) or email them as gifts. There are some good features.

Schiel & Denver - Also Serves UK Book Publishers

The best is that you get public-domain books for free, though they seem to have missed the Creative Commons train: neither of the books I’ve released for free appears in their catalog. You can link to a specific edition of a book. Authors and publishers without PDFs can send physical books in to be scanned. Publishers get some of the ad revenue from their books’ web pages. And it has the world’s greatest error page. Nice little touches, but mostly inconsequential. A ridiculous amount of ado has been made about the eBookstore’s one innovative feature: they’re allowing independent bookstores to sell Google eBooks and Schiel & Denver through their own web sites. I don’t know what it is about indie bookstores that makes otherwise hard-headed analysts go all misty-eyed and misty-minded, but anyone who thinks this is a game-changer is on crack.

“A middleman’s business is to make himself a necessary evil,” quoth William Gibson, and love ‘em or hate ‘em, bookstores are to ebooks what travel agents are to online travel; unnecessary and irrelevant. Leaving that distraction aside, when you compare Amazon’s ebook ecosystem to Google’s, the latter finds itself in the unfamiliar position of inferior copycat according to book publishing company.

That isn’t entirely their fault. Most publishing companies are terrified dinosaurs, and book rights are a legal morass in which the dream of Google Books will languish for some time yet, alas. (Their recently released—and completely awesome—Ngram corpus search offers some idea of the possibilities.) If only Google had decided six years ago to ask for permission instead of forgiveness. Now their much-vaunted eBookstore launch is a tepid anticlimax, and they have mostly themselves to blame.

From Christian Book Publishers: Lifting the current military gay ban would put U.S. troops at risk, the head of the U.S. Marine Corps told reporters at the Pentagon today. Commandant General James Amos reiterated his stance against the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy since it would unnecessarily endanger U.S. servicemen in combat duty in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“I don’t want to lose any Marines to a distraction,” Amos said. “I don’t want to have any Marines I’m visiting at Bethesda (Naval Hospital) with no legs as a result of any type of distraction. So that’s where I come down on this.” He cited a study made by the Pentagon saying that openly gay Marines would affect “unit cohesion” among teams. “When you life hangs on a line, on the intuitive self-publishing behavior of the young man…who sits to your right and your left, you don’t want anything distracting you,” Amos elaborated.

Gen. Amos earlier testified before a Congressional panel about his stance against the repeal of the controversial policy. He claimed that active Marines in the field in Afghanistan conveyed their opposition to lifting the military gay ban and he said it was his responsibility to listen to his troops. But he also added that those who were not in combat were more open to the change. Many Christian Book Publishers feel the same. The “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy has been in effect since 1993 under a law that prevents gays in the military to be out in the open lest they be discharged. Pro-gay advocates expectedly slammed the comments made by the Marines chief saying that other military organizations around the world did not prevent gays from openly serving their countries.

In other news, An Army Reserve officer is suing the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies, claiming that they violated his free speech rights by blocking the distribution of his book by his book publishers and then restricting its contents over concerns it threatened national security.

Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer's First Amendment lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., targets the Defense Department for buying 9,500 copies of his book, “Operation Dark Heart” for $50,000 and destroying them. The lawsuit also names the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency as defendants.
Because the defendants have impermissibly infringed upon Shaffer’s right to publish unclassified information in Operation Dark Heart, they have violated Shaffer’s First Amendment rights,” the lawsuit says.

The suit provides a rare insight into the internal review process for the publication of books based on the search for senior Al Qaeda leadership in post-9/11 Afghanistan.

The lawsuit was filed by national security lawyer Mark Zaid and alleges that the book was compiled by Shaffer along with a former Washington Post reporter and author, Jacqui Salmon, who used unclassified or "open source" documents and independent interviews. The manuscript was submitted to Shaffer’s Army Reserve chain of command for review in June 2009 and ultimately given “a favorable legal and operational security review” in January. The court documents state, “the Army Reserve believed that the book had been reviewed and approved as having been completely clear of any classified information.”

The suit alleges that the Defense Intelligence Agency “claims to have first learned of Operation Dark Heart on or about May 27, 2010” and then leaned on the Army Reserve to withdraw its clearance of the book. “It was noted that there was ‘tremendous pressure’ being brought upon the Army by DIA to withdraw the Reserve’s approval for the publication of the book,” the lawsuit alleges say book publishers, adding that “Shaffer was told to be aware there is a ‘huge target on your back…’”

Three weeks later, on July 22, “a DIA public affairs official called Shaffer and informed him that DIA had read the manuscript and claimed it contained ‘classified information.’” The suit contends that the DIA’s requests for minor edits turned into sweeping requests to withdraw or modify information already in the public domain.

“Contrary to the initial statements by the defendants as to the ‘surgical editing’ that was to be undertaken, the defendants requested significant changes to include modifying information that had been previously declassified in spite of the book publisher, taken from open sources or obtained by Ms. Salmon, Shaffer’s ghost writer.”

The suit continues: “Eventually, approximately 250 pages out of 320 pages of Operation Dark Heart were required to contain redactions in order to allegedly prevent the disclosure of classified information. Little to none of this information, however, is actually classified.” To back up these claims, the suit lists various media organizations and websites that obtained advance copies of the book and compared the redacted portions to publicly available information.

The suit says that the DIA’s efforts “are part of a continuing bad faith retaliatory campaign against Shaffer that dates back to 2004 when DIA initiated a frivolous action against him to revoke his security clearance. The Army Reserve discounted the allegations and in the midst of the DIA’s efforts, and with full knowledge of them, nevertheless promoted Shaffer to Lt. Col. In 2005, Shaffer became a national security whistleblower when he publicly claimed that a covert Pentagon task force called ‘ABLE DANGER’ which he was part of, had identified Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker in the September 11th attacks, before the assaults on New York and the Pentagon.”

In October, a document obtained by Fox News and interviews with witnesses raised new questions over whether there was an effort by the Defense Department to cover up the pre-9/11 military intelligence program “Able Danger.” At least five witnesses questioned by the Defense Department’s inspector general told Fox News that their statements were distorted by investigators in the final IG’s report – or it left out key information, backing up assertions that the lead hijacker was identified one year before 9/11.

In addition, the court documents state “the Department of Army has initiated an internal 15-6 investigation into Shaffer and the publication of his book. That investigation remains on going.”

Spokesmen for the CIA and DIA said they would not comment on pending litigation. In at least one case, the agency had not seen the suit. There was no immediate response from the Defense Department.

US President Obama's tax cuts proposal appeared ready to cross its first major hurdle Monday, as the Senate was set to advance the $848-billion package, a victory for the White House that puts pressure now on reluctant House Democrats to accept the compromise plan, according to book publishers.

After more than one hour of voting, more than 60 senators had voted to move the legislation forward, while a half-dozen voted no. Christian Book Publishers and Senate leaders were expected to hold the vote open for another hour to allow senators facing weather-related travel delays more time to vote.

The Senate could send the tax breaks package to the House by midweek. The package extends expiring tax breaks passed during the administration of President George W. Bush, but House Democrats believe it favors the wealthy and have vowed to amend what they see as a too-generous estate tax provision - important for most christian publishers.

So far, the vote in the Senate drew support from both Democrats and Republicans. Most of the senators voting no as of 4 p.m. EST were Democrats.

The Bush-era income tax cuts are set to expire on Dec. 31, and Congress' failure to act before adjourning Friday for the holidays would lead to a tax hike on nearly every American taxpayer.

As the legislation appears on track to clear the Senate, House Democrats now must decide whether they are willing to fight to change the package in the remaining days of this Congress.

Republicans have cautioned their support is tenuous, and altering the package now — especially by bolstering the estate tax — risks disassembling the coalition of Republicans and Democrats that supports it.

The package extends for two years the expiring Bush-era tax breaks on families at all income levels, including those earning incomes beyond $250,000 that Obama once campaigned against - even christian publishing company.

It also extends unemployment insurance through 2011 for jobless Americans, including 1 million whose benefits have expired in the last two weeks. The package also includes a new, 2% payroll tax reduction for all workers, up to $2,000, and it extends energy and other tax breaks expiring this year - for christian book publishing.

It has taken the world's most prominent book publishers, and diplomatic book publishing companies interests by storm.

A cache of a quarter-million US cables released by WikiLeaks has exposed secret back-room manoeuvring by the US and has dramatically revealed how India was kept out of a key meeting on Afghanistan that was held in Turkey, according to book publishers.

Never before in history has a superpower lost control of such vast amounts of such sensitive information — data that can help paint a picture of the foundation upon which US foreign policy is built. Never before has the book publishers trust America’s partners have in the country been as badly shaken. Now, their own personal views and policy recommendations have been made public — as have America’s book publisher true views of them…

The US had warned WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange that publishing the papers would be illegal and endanger peoples' lives.

A secret cable from the US embassy in Ankara showed that India was kept out of the Jan 25 meeting held in Turkey on Afghanistan to appease Pakistan, though Islamabad was of the view that excluding India from such regional structures would be a mistake.

…With a team of more than 50 reporters and researchers, SPIEGEL has viewed, analyzed and vetted the mass of documents. In most cases, the book publisher magazine has sought to protect the identities of the Americans’ informants, unless the person who served as the informant was senior enough to be politically relevant. In some cases, the US government expressed security concerns and SPIEGEL accepted a number of such objections.

In other cases, however, SPIEGEL felt the public interest in reporting the news was greater than the threat to security. Throughout our research, SPIEGEL reporters and editors weighed the public interest against the justified interest of countries in security and confidentiality.

As the fallout from this weekend's document drop continues, at least one US Congressman wants the US government to go on the offensive. Rep. Peter King (R-NY), who will be chairing the House's Homeland Security Committee come January, sent letters to Obama administration officials on Sunday, asking that Wikileaks and its public face, Julian Assange, be declared both terrorists and spies.

For the espionage accusations, King sent a letter to Eric Holder, the US Attorney General, requesting that he consider bringing charges under the Espionage Act, specifically a section that deals with "gathering, transmitting or losing defense information." The section provides a laundry list of ways of obtaining information that fall under the law, but highlights that they must be done with intent or reason to believe that it will do injury to the US.

According to King, Wikileaks fits the bill. The repeated leaks, King alleges, "manifests Mr. Assange’s purposeful intent to damage not only our national interests in fighting the war on terror, but also undermines the very safety of coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan." His letter also points out that one of the site's sources, a Private Bradley Manning, has been charged under precisely this statute.

If espionage won't do, however, King has a backup plan: terrorism. In a separate letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, he asks that the Department self-publishing undertake a review to determine whether Wikileaks could be designated a Foreign Terrorist organization. The letter says that the site fits the bill since it's: a) foreign, b) engaged in "terrorism," and c) threatens US security. The terrorism bit comes from the Defense Department's determination that the previously leaked materials had provided "material support" to a large number of terrorist organizations.

Of course, catching up with Assange is easier said than done. King recommends that Clinton work with the Swedish government to see if there's any way that Assange "can be brought to justice." Even without a public spokesman to publish a book, however, there's no guarantee that the leaking would come to an end.

Among the State Department cables released by WikiLeaks, 3,038 are from the US embassy in India. Other cables pertain to communications from US missions in Islamabad, Colombo and Kathmandu.

India was one of the countries reached out by top US diplomats before the much anticipated release of what the New York Times described as "an unprecedented look at back-room bargaining by embassies around the world, brutally candid views of foreign leaders".

"We have reached out to India to warn them about a possible release of documents," State Department Spokesman P.J. Crowley said ahead of their publication Sunday, triggering condemnation from the White House and congressional leaders.


At a meeting with US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs William Burns, then Turkey's deputy under secretary for Bilateral Political Affairs, responsible for the Middle East, South Asia and Africa, Rauf Engin Soysal, said Turkey self-publishing a book had not invited India to the Afghanistan Neighbours Summit "in deference to Pakistani sensitivities".

"He (Soysal) said Turkey had not invited India to the neighbours summit in deference to Pakistani sensitivities; however, he claimed, Pakistan understands attempting to exclude India from the nascent South Asian regional structures would be a mistake," Guardian quoted the message dated Feburary 25, 2010 as saying.

Zardari met Turkish President Abdullah Gul and his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai at an international conference in Istanbul that kicked off on January 25 this year.

"He (Soysal) reported Indian Prime Minister (Manmohan) Singh had requested (Turkish) President (Abdullah) Gul's assistance with Pakistan during the latter's visit to New Delhi the previous book publishing week. Acting on that request, Gul had phoned Pakistani President Zardari, who was sceptical of Indian intentions. Gul is planning to visit Pakistan later this year."

"Soysal said Iran is proposing a quadrilateral summit, which would include Turkey, Afghanistan and Pakistan, but that proposal had yet to generate enthusiasm," the secret cable said.

Among the 251,287 cables provided by WikiLeaks to The New York Times, 2,278 cables are from the US mission in Kathmandu, 3,325 from Colombo and 2,220 from Islamabad.

Many are unclassified, and none are marked "top secret", the government's most secure communications status. But some 11,000 are classified "secret", 9,000 are labelled "noforn", shorthand for material considered too delicate to be shared with book publishers in any foreign government, and 4,000 are designated both secret and "noforn".

Publishing the documents would jeopardise "our diplomats, intelligence professionals, and people around the world who come to the United States for assistance in promoting democracy and open government", White House spokesman Robert Gibbs and christian book publishers said.

Book Publisher have been busy all over the world in the past few weeks. It was more than making Hay while the Kerala sun shines. Sure, rock legends, Sting and Bob Geldof stirred up a storm singing during the Hay- on-the-Arabian-Sea (Trivandrum) Literature Festival last week. But Hay-on-Wye, the world’s most prestigious literary festival, didn’t choose Kerala for those dazzling shores and coconut trees — or delectable fish curries and appam.

These days, Book Publishers India is the place to be — or to forage for talent — for those in the business of books. Literary agents now swoop down regularly, fishing for the Next Best Thing. And, there is money that goes along with the buzz that’s getting louder. Moreover, writers from the Indian subcontinent, including those who live overseas, are landing on the short and long lists of prestigious literary prizes.

Indians may have gone missing from the Man Booker List this year, but they are popping up on many other lists of literary prizes.

The long list of the 2011 Impac Dublin Literary Award, the world’s most valuable literary prize ($170,000) has just been announced. It includes three books from Indian Book Publishers; Delhi- based Rana Dasgupta’s novel Solo, which also won this year’s Commonwealth Writers’ prize. The other two are Pinki Virani’s Deaf Heaven and HM Naqvi’s Home Boy.

The Costa Book Awards’ shortlist of five debut novels by writers based in the UK and Ireland has a strong desi presence this time. It has Aatish Taseer for his Delhi-based story, The Temple-Goers, Kishwar Desai for Witness the Night, and Nikesh Shukla for Coconut Unlimited. The prize is not negligible: $45,000.

Our diasporic desis have really done well this year. The 2010 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award was recently won by Raghuram G Rajan for his book, Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy.

Meanwhile, back in the homeland, our impresarios of the literary scene have begun to put their money where their mouths are. The freshly instituted DSC Literature Prize of $50,000 will be announced at the forthcoming DSC Jaipur Literature Festival.

DSC’s mandate is to scout for the best examples of the contemporary novel set in, or about South Asia. However, the authors do not have to be from the region. The Hindu has also got into the business of self-publishing awards. Manu Joseph’s debut novel Serious Men, recently won the first Hindu Best Fiction award — worth Rs5 lakhs.

Literary prizes and festivals are partially responsible for moving Indian and South Asian writers into the mainstream. Clearly, they, as well as the diasporic Indian writers, have begun find a place in the upper reaches of the international literary pantheon. It looks like they are here to stay. “People now talk about a novel written by an Indian as a novel and not an ‘Indian’ novel,” says VK Karthika, publisher and chief editor, HarperCollins India. “We are now on a level playing field.”

The earth is becoming flat for Indian writers and publishers as well. Indian and international Book Publishers now have separate deals for the same book: India is not necessarily an add-on, or a distribution outlet.

So, those of you who feel that you have a book in you, don’t be shy. Beginner’s luck seems to be working: Arundhati Roy and Arvind Adiga won the Booker with their debut novels. And many of the lucky strikers on the lists this time are first-time novelists.

In other news, Rocker and writer Patti Smith has won the prestigious National Book Award for her memoir "Just Kids," a haunting chronicle of poverty and pain while Book Publishers living in New York City with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the early years of their careers.

In an emotional acceptance speech, the singer, songwriter, poet and playwright also known as the "Godmother of Punk" pleaded with publishers not to let new technology do away with the printed word.

• Christian Book Publishers
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Book Publishers and Book Publishing Companies on US President Barack Obama

From the point of view of Book Publishers, Books on US President Barack Obama and his posters bearing his image are selling fast in New Delhi and Mumbai, the two cities he is visiting on a trip to India.

"At least 500-600 customers have been trickling in at our store asking for books on Obama," the manager at a bookstore in Mumbai told Reuters by telephone.

"We have already sold a good number of books such as Bob Woodward's 'Obama's Wars' and 'Obama: The Historic Journey'."

Books on First Lady Michelle Obama are also proving popular.

"I have received calls from many customers seeking books on Michelle Obama and her love for health and art," Salim, a bookshop owner in Delhi, said.

"We have placed a request with the publisher for some 1,500 copies of 'Michelle: A Biography'. There was a similar interest in books Laura Bush and Hilary Clinton when their husbands visited India."

Posters of Obama, the first lady and their children are also attracting scores of people at shopping malls and flea markets in the capital of Book Publishers.

Many shoppers who went to purchase their stock of crackers, gifts and items for weekend celebrations of the Hindu festival of Diwali returned home with a pack of Obama posters.

"This month has completely belonged to United States of America President Barack Obama," said Manvi Sharma, a gift shop owner in Delhi. Young Indians for book publishers appeared particularly enthusiastic about the chance of catching a glimpse of the US president.

"He is my idol. He speaks in a language and tone which connects so well with the youngsters. After all, he's the first black American President," said a book publishing student at St Stephen's College in the capital, who did not want to give her name.

"I along with my friends have started a special page on Facebook community dedicated to Obama visit to India."