Legacy.com guestbook

Abby Levine will retire in June after 28 years of editorial work at Albert Whitman. She will continue to work on "select projects" for the company.

Kevin Smokler has been named vp, marketing for Byliner, responsible for overseeing marketing initiatives, community management and social media projects. He co-founded and served as ceo for Booktour.com. 

BEA has announced the roster of author-focused events around New York City during the same week as the convention, known as New York Book Week. Joining traditional venues such as the NY Public Library and Barnes & Noble is the Apple store in Soho, which will host Meet the Author sessions all week. Also participating Borders at Columbus Circle, The Brooklyn Public Library, Bryant Park Reading Room, The Center for Fiction, Greenlight Bookstore, McNally Jackson Bookstore, powerHouse Arena, Symphony Space, and WORD Books. The full roster is posted here.

Also spreading the word on reading around New York the week is a joint effort between Penguin Classics and the NYPL. 25,000 copies of a new limited-edition book KNOW THY PAST, FIND THE FUTURE, will be distributed free across the city starting May 19. The book comprises photos and essays from "over 100 luminaries discussing items from The New York Public Library's vast collection." It commemorates the 100th birthday of the NYPL's building at 42 Street and Fifth Avenue, and Penguin Classics' 65th anniversary.

Chris Fabry's ALMOST HEAVEN won the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association Christian Fiction Book of the Year award.

In Canada, a gift from MP Hilary Weston will make the newly renamed Writers Trust Hilary Weston Prize the largest award for factual writing, with winners to receive $ 60,000. 

Globe & Mail

Charlaine Harris has become the fourth author to sell over 1 million Kindle books, Amazon announced.

Book and multimedia developer Vaughn Street will work with Vook as their exclusive creative development partner for publishers and authors in the Christian genre.

At Little, Brown, Michelle Aielli is moving up to director of publicity, and Sabrina Callahan has been promoted to assistant director of publicity, James Patterson. Both will continue to report to Nicole Dewey.

Scholastic has hired Duriya Aziz as vp, educational publishing, international group, reporting to Shane Armstrong, president, Scholastic international and growth markets. Aziz was at educational publisher Marshall Cavendish International (Singapore). Based in Singapore, she will be "responsible for building a publishing team to develop and adapt existing product for international markets, with a particular focus on the Southeast Asian region" along with directing the publishing operations at Scholastic India.

Independent Publishers Group is celebrating its fortieth anniversary with a new logo, and "will also move towards using the initials 'IPG,' which is how it is referred to by much of the industry."

Judith Regan has settled the lawsuit brought by her former attorneys at the now-bankrupt law firm of Dreier. She tells NY Magazine, "Everyone had reached a settlement agreement in the fall. The papers were not completely signed, they had been drafted." The case made news in February after the discovery of documents that were inadvertently not sealed, which revealed Regan's contention that Fox News chief Roger Ailes "advised Regan to lie to, and to withhold information from, investigators concerning Bernard Kerik." Regan adds, "We settled before the Roger Ailes article."
NY

Richard Nash's Red Lemonade has opened for online business, as the line begins its trade publishing program. Three titles have their full text posted via the site. Visitors can, if they wish, both comment on and annotate the text, and respond to others' comments and annotations. Red Lemonade is billed as the "first imprint" from Cursor. (NB: the beta site was live earlier this morning, then hanging when we tried the line again.)

Elsewhere, Lauren Flower joins HarperCollins Children's Books this week as director of integrated marketing. Previously she spent eight years at Random House Children's where she was most recently senior manager, new media marketing.

Meredith Barnes joins Lowenstein Associates as a digital strategist and foreign rights manager. Formerly at FinePrint Literary Management, she will be building her own list as well.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will open a Washington, D.C. office this summer devoted to its global corporate social responsibility efforts and the HMH Foundation. Samuel Casey will serve as svp of Global CSR for the company, as well as executive director of the HMH Foundation. He was  was president of the U.S. division of CfBT Education Trust and previously served as president of National Heritage Academies, a charter school management company.

Electric Literature, Kore Press and Burton Freeman's My Own Book are among the recipients of the National Book Foundation's Innovations in Reading Prizes.

Alibris will launch a book rental service for Gold members starting in August. 

We misspelled the first name of Candice Chaplin at Random House.

Jessica Sindler has been promoted to editor at Gotham, where she has worked since 2003. 

Brigantine Media will launch two new imprints, with Voyage devoted to Vermont fiction and Compass specializing in education books, beginning in Fall 2011. 

Chris Schluep has been named senior editor, Amazon.com Books, effective May 23. Previously he was a senior editor with Ballantine/Del Rey.

Jennifer Hunt is joining Penguin Children's Dial Books as vp of acquisition and development and editor-at-large, starting next week, reporting to Lauri Hornik. She will acquire and develop literary and high-quality commercial fiction, from picture books to YA, and will also "liaise with the film/tv/game community on the west coast." Hunt was most recently editorial director at Little, Brown Children's.

Judy Courtade will join Perseus Distribution as associate director, client services. Her most recent position was sales director for Black Dog & Leventhal and prior to that she was vp, sales director at Random House

The Edgar Awards were announced in over a dozen categories, including:

The Lock Artist, Steve Hamilton (Minotaur Books)

Rogue Island, Bruce De Silva (Forge)

Long Time Coming, by Robert Goddard (Bantam Trade Paperbacks)

Founder of Kim Ricketts Book Events Kim Ricketts died Monday night in Seattle from complications of bone cancer and AL amyloidosis. She was 53. Ricketts founded her company in 2003 as a means of connecting authors to non-traditional venues such as Starbucks, Microsoft and other Seattle-based businesses. 

Lisa Barnes has been promoted to assistant director of publicity at Ballantine Bantam Dell, and Alizon Mosciovecchio has been promoted to senior publicist.

Greg Mortenson's climbing partner Scott Darnsey has seen the controversy over THREE CUPS OF TEA from Nepal and e-mailed Outside Magazine. Though cited by Jon Krakauer as a source, Darnsey now says: "I did say to Jon Krakauer that Greg didn't go to Korphe until 1994. However, on our way out, Greg got lost a second time somewhere between the Biafo glacier region and Askole. About half a day later, Greg finally showed up in Askole saying he'd made a major wrong turn. He'd ended up in a village on the wrong side of the Braldu River. It's certainly plausible that this was Korphe." (That still doesn't square what Mortenson now calls a few hours, versus the book's account of many days.)

Darnsey also says that "Greg recounted to me his imprisonment in Waziristan when I met him in Beijing. I don't doubt that he was held against his will."

His larger point is that "I feel that the message, the good, and the outcomes far exceed some journalistic faux pas in the retelling of a story from ten years previous. "

Meanwhile, though in print the NYT regularly chastises book publishers for not fact-checking memoirs, NYTBR editor Sam Tanenhaus defends book publishers' practices on NPR and acknowledges that both "publishers and newspapers don't use fact checkers."

The Boulder Book Store will charge fees of between five and ten dollars to attend most of their author events in the future--and will give attendees five dollars off the purchase price of the books featured at those events. marketing and promotions manager Stephanie Schindhelm says, "We want to encourage people to spend their money locally and to help support the author." 

Owner David Bolduc told customers by e-mail, "More and more, we compete with other bookstores vying to host popular authors. Publishers place certain expectations on us when we host events, and so in order to continually attract authors, we must fulfill these expectations. Oftentimes, in return for sending an author to a bookstore, publishers expect us to attract a certain number of people and sell a certain number of books."