From the press release:
The organizers of the Sharp Writ Book Awards confirmed that a Kindle™ author has threatened legal action against them for their refusal to accept digital books for consideration for the awards. The author, whose name is being withheld, has claimed that by refusing to accept the digital eBooks, the Sharp Writ Book Awards Organizers were denying equal opportunity to writers who have chosen e-publishers over traditional paper bound publishing.
“We decided to exclude e-Books because of practical issues.” explained Yashpal Talreja, Coordinator for the BLSIG. “Unfortunately, all the popular e-publishing platforms use proprietary formats; accepting digitally published books for the Awards would have required us to equip each of our judges with a Kindle™, a Nook™, a Sony reader, and an iPad™; and still we will miss some platforms. It is truly astounding to see how much interest the Awards have generated, the books have been pouring in from all over the world.
This is absurd on a couple levels. One, the award organizers can exclude anything they want; this is perfectly legal. And two, they could have set a requirement that any ebook submitted be available in a specific format or store. The Sharp Writ people seriously damaged their credibility here. If they can’t figure out how to accept ebooks, then how competent could they be as publishers?
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The Eppies require submission in as-sells, non-DRM PDF format. (Which I expect them to start getting flak for soon, as ePub becomes more popular.) Certainly, an awards committee could require a non-DRM’d submission for consideration. They could very reasonably insist on a non-DRM’d, open format ebook (which means PDF, ePub, fb2, RTF or HTML?)
“Equip with a Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader and iPad”… how ridiculous. No, they’d need a *computer;* all the ebooks from those ebook stores can be read on a desktop computer. Different software, all DRM’d, but that’s a different issue.
Actually, I think PDF might be the best option. There will be some books where the formatting is critically important, and that is one thing PDF does best.