Rose says her awards are based on her idea of the electronic form as a means "to debut and grow new authors, to bring back the midlist, to give a real opportunity to authors who write between genres or for niche audiences, and [are] for innovators who envision books becoming multimedia experiments." The objective is to "recognize the true pioneers and creative minds," Rose says.

Mary Wolf, publisher and editor in chief of the four-year-old Hard Shell Word Factory, an ever-growing, genre-driven e-publisher, thought that the Frankfurt eBook Awards were supposed to "be a way to highlight electronic publishing. We thought it was going to give us a chance to compete on an even field. I really believed that until I saw the list of judges, all New York publishing people." Wolf and many other e-publishers assumed that their authors would be competing against one another, as they did in the first annual Eppie Awards in August, sponsored by the Electronically Published Internet Connection. Hard Shell Word Factory won in seven out of 15 Eppie categories -- and not by having its first-time romance, horror and mystery writers go up against a literary darling like Zadie Smith, whose novel "White Teeth" was converted from print to e-format and thus became an IeBAF finalist.

"When Bill Gates first announced the creation of the IeBAF, all the e-authors I know -- and I know at least 2,000 of them -- were all really excited," Rose recalls. "Then I saw the list of judges, none of whom are at the forefront of this new industry, and most of whom are very much entrenched in traditional publishing, except maybe James Gleick [author of "Faster"]. I lost my great expectations." Eberhard seconds this disappointment, revealing that "NuvoMedia stood next to Microsoft [at last year's Frankfurt Book Fair, when the establishment of the IeBAF was first announced] and volunteered effort and time and money, and we were excluded from any say about how the judging was done, or from contributing to the selection of judges."

The IeBAF judges are largely culled from the print world; they include literary scout Maria Campbell, Parade magazine publisher Walter Anderson, Library of America president Cheryl Hurley and writers Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Daniel Boorstin. In contrast, Rose points out, the Independent e-Book Awards panel consists solely of people dedicated to e-books, who aim to "recognize excellence in electronic books, hypertext and digital storytelling" (the three fiction and nonfiction categories for the Independent e-Book Awards).

Many of the Independent e-Book Awards judges also boast a profile in print publishing; for example, New York Review of Books co-founder and former Random House editorial director Jason Epstein and literary agent Loretta Barrett are among the 14 judges Rose has enlisted in the past week. The luminaries in the e-book world include former Yahoo executive and e-book author Seth Godin, Foreword magazine editor Mardi Link and Electronic Literature Organization executive director Scott Rettberg. Rose will also serve as one of the judges, turning over the organizing reins to Sunny Ross, co-creator of the Mystic-Ink writers community in California. The group will be soliciting original e-books exclusively from independent houses, which can send in up to two entries per category, and unlike the Frankfurt eBook Awards, the Independent e-Book Awards will include self-published writers.

It is rare at this point for e-books to get review or media attention, the two things the e-community most desperately craves. Rose reports that the Independent e-Book Awards "are geared around attention, not money." The short-fiction finalists will be published by Random House Audible, a digital spoken-word imprint of Random House; first- and second-prize winners will also get reviewed in Foreword magazine; and the winners' works will benefit from a media campaign. The awards ceremony is scheduled for spring 2001.

The IeBAF has a different vision of its mission, albeit a vision that is still being shaped. Its priority, judging director Peter Mollman insists, is not to boost what has already been done in a still nascent form, but to demonstrate that e-books can and should measure up to the standards of "p-books." "No one was trying to promote the big guys or anything like that. The idea of not representing the community -- that really never came into our minds as we were setting up the judges. The only criterion we were looking for in the judges was an ability to be a great critic, a great evaluator of quality and independent of mind."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"