Talk:American Book Awards

Is this list of winners right?
The list of winners doesn't align with the information about the number of awards granted which is confirmed. I am beginning to suspect that there may be two different awards entitled "American Book Award" by two diffent associations...Nrswanson (talk) 05:40, 20 November 2008 (UTC)


 * See this source and this source . I think these might be two seperate awards with the same name.Nrswanson (talk) 05:46, 20 November 2008 (UTC)


 * (edit conflict) but yes, I agree but believe we can do this.
 * Move the contents of this article to one called The American Book Awards / Before Columbus Foundation. I don't know if space/slash/space is allowed meaning it may be The American Book Awards/Before Columbus Foundation.
 * Create a new article titled The American Book Awards that would be about the National Book Foundation's award.
 * Change this article to be an disambiguation between the two similarly named awards. At present the name of this article is wrong anyway as it's "American Book Award" (singular) while the ABA's award is called either "American Book Awards" (plural) or maybe "The American Book Awards." I believe the latter name is correct as that's what they use on their Book Industry Awards page.
 * Nrswanson - note that your version of the page is available in the history meaning it'll be easy to copy to The American Book Awards though the list of books will need to be created from scratch as it's entirely different than the ABA's list. --Marc Kupper|talk 05:55, 20 November 2008 (UTC)


 * However you want to handle it is fine. I actually have a bunch of other projects that need my attention right now and only ended up here over an arguement at Lloyd Alexander which actually involved a dispute over whether he won a NBA or ABA. So do what you feel is best. I'm just glad that this is getting sorted out. Cheers.Nrswanson (talk) 05:59, 20 November 2008 (UTC)
 * I left a message on your talk but see both of us are busy. I'll add this to my queue as something I want to look into is if it's on to start an article title with the word "The" or if Wikipedians should use American Book Awards. The NBA site needs some looking over as it's not clear if the award is still called TABA or if it's been changed to lessen confusion with the ABA's award. --Marc Kupper|talk 06:12, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

This list does not match
This list of authors and titles does not match one official list of people (no book titles or other roles specified), PREVIOUS WINNERS OF THE AMERICAN BOOK AWARD (1980:2001). Comparison must be slow because this one is not ordered alphabetically. (Why not?) Just now I checked 1980 to 1982 and found three discrepancies.
 * 1980, our list matches the official list of 8
 * 1981, our list lacks the last two of 14: Frank Stanford, Larry Neal
 * 1982, our list lacks the last one of 16: Chester Himes

Neal and Himes are out of alphabetical order at the ends of those official lists. The patterns suggest to me that Neal and Himes, perhaps also Sanford, may have been recognized for something other than writing books. Who knows? --P64 (talk) 20:41, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

Rename to "American Book Awards"
Are there any objections to moving/renaming this article to The American Book Awards? It's not clear if the Before Columbus Foundation has an official web site but that's the title used here, on one of their press releases, and on the American Booksellers Association's list of book industry awards.

Per Manual of Style Wikipedia article titles normally should not start with the word "The" it appears correct to do so in this case as it's a proper noun. --Marc Kupper|talk 01:06, 21 November 2008 (UTC)


 * Correction - I scanned all of the pages under http://www.ankn.uaf.edu/IEW/BeforeColumbus/ and they are using "American Book Awards" without the "The".
 * They list their street address as
 * American Book Awards
 * Before Columbus Foundation
 * The Raymond House
 * 655 - 13th Street, Suite 302
 * Oakland, CA 94612
 * The header of the 2003, 2004 and 2005 announcements all clearly list the title as "American Book Awards" in the announcement headers.


 * They did use "The American Book Awards" in the right margin of the 2003, 2004, and 2005 announcements but normally used a leading "The" as needed to reference the awards and not as part of the title.


 * Thus the proposal is modified to move/rename this article to American Book Awards as American Book Award is used to refer to an individual winner. --Marc Kupper|talk 01:38, 21 November 2008 (UTC)


 * Sounds good to me. I say be bold!Nrswanson (talk) 03:52, 21 November 2008 (UTC)


 * Better late than never--I just moved it! Aristophanes68 (talk) 17:56, 21 July 2010 (UTC)

Who wins?
There are no categories. Is anyone able to generalize about the winning books? How many are written for children? for young adults? How many are nonfiction? How many are multicultural(ist)?

How many are winners of the National Book Award ? I recognize only two such double winners in our list.
 * Joyce Carol Thomas, Marked by Fire (1982)
 * National 1983 Children's Books, Fiction, Paperback
 * American 1982


 * Alice McDermott, Charming Billy (1998)
 * National 1998 Fiction
 * American 1999

These data rely on our lists of winners. (And I know of the "American Book Awards" only from this chronological-alphabetical list of winners. But I recognize hundreds of "National Book Awards" winners and maybe a hundred losing finalists from work on our author and book articles.)

Multiple winners of the "National" awards include ... Lloyd Alexander, David McCullough, Philip Roth, John Updike ... although each won only one NBA during the "American" timespan 1980 to date, it may be more than coincidence that none has won the ABA. --P64 (talk) 19:57, 13 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Validation. How reliably would I recognize double winners? Just now I skimmed the hundreds* of authors biographies that link to this article (listed by the tool "What links here?") and recognized four "National" award winning authors (not titles). Upon checking those four biographies I find that only one link is correct, and that one (Sherman Alexie won the two awards for two different books.) So my reliability is not bad. The other three link here only by American/National naming confusion.
 * (*)the hundreds of spurious links may have been reduced by twenty during my work on perhaps 200 winners this year 2012. --P64 (talk) 20:13, 13 March 2012 (UTC)
 * When you say you checked their bios, do you mean their WP articles or their personal website bios? I'm not sure everyone on this list has this award mentioned on their WP pages. But can you clarify what you mean? Aristophanes 68   (talk)  20:35, 13 March 2012 (UTC)
 * --I checked those four of the numerous wikipedia biographies that link here, in order to see whether
 * they link erroneously (by attributing this American Book Award to their subjects, who did not win it or
 * they link correctly
 * because their subjects did win this award, or
 * for some other reason, such as a note explaining that the National Book Award should not be confused this one —i have put such notes only (a) in !--hidden comments-- and (b) in Edit summaries and (c) on Talk pages, so that mine do not cause articles to show up as "What links here?"
 * Only one of those four links was correct. --P64 (talk) 21:00, 14 March 2012 (UTC)
 * (I have revised those four articles, so that only Alexie now links here, correctly. I have also checked all the articles and lists that link here directly (links with the plural title; many fewer than links with the singular title, which are redirected), and deleted the incorrect links from two of them.)
 * I guess that I have deleted two dozen spurious links to this article during winter 2012 and that several remain.
 * The bottom line here and above is some need for a lot of brute clerical work. --P64 (talk) 23:04, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

Current or latest rendition
Today I have inserted section 1 "Current rendition". It includes a copy of the 2011 awards list, which is therefore duplicated until it is retired from the new section in favor of 2012. That copy at the end of the full list, the foot of the article, [a] shows the usual mess of redlinks and [b] hides URL references that identify all of the redlink authors including their diacritical marks.

With the same purpose elsewhere I have tried section heading "Latest rendition", and I have tried alternation between "Current" and "Latest" as the content of the section changes during the cycle. Perhaps it should be "Current or latest rendition" because [a] stable sectioning is good and [b] frequency of update is unpredictable. --P64 (talk) 15:47, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

Subtitle "A Novel"
There were about 20 listings with some main title and subtitle ": A Novel". None of those subtitles is includes in the lists of winners for 2002 to 2006 (ref name=ankn), which cover about five of those books. Two of those lists are pdf copies of the awards program, and do include some other subtitles.2004(Crescent) 2005(Country of Origin)

Judging that all or nearly all of these subtitles are spurious --perhaps helpful notes by booksellers?-- I have replaced all 20 with ", a novel" following but not part of the title. --P64 (talk) 17:44, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

Listings revised
Today I have revised the listings back to 2002, and alphabetized them by author where necessary, by reference to the previously given source ref name=booksellers (2007-2011) and the new source ref name=ankn (2002-2006).

Some rules of format that I have followed: --P64 (talk) 18:49, 7 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Titles: No redlinks.
 * Titles: Display all articles (A, The) and all subtitles in the given sources and all those in our previous listings, except . (Articles and subtitles are likely to be genuine where they do not conflict and their absence is little or no evidence against.)
 * Authors, etc: Display all diacritics in the given sources, our previous listings, or somewhere else that I happened to look. (Diacritics are likely to be genuine where they do not conflict and their absence is little or no evidence against.)
 * Editors, etc: No redlinks where authors are also named. In these cases the editor/s is also named at the end of the line rather than the beginning.


 * This seems to be one of the only articles in Wikipedia where a list of names are alphabetized by first name, which is still not the way it's done anywhere but in Wikipedia. If one is searching through a list of names, we tend to alphabetize by family name, not by first name.  I would recommend reordering the list of winners in the accepted way.
 * Also, I added redlinks (sometimes already blue) to editors, "etc." because editors and translators who have done a notable enough job that they are recognized by an American Book Award are notables, and should have at least a stub about them. Otherwise, thanks, P64. Bruxism (talk) 22:54, 14 October 2013 (UTC)


 * The article should always include a section on the current rendition. I restored it and filled it with 2013 data; we are now between announcement and ceremony. The 2013 markup is naive: copy and paste plus bullet *, linked authorname, italic title.
 * There are numerous problems with the data at least for 1980 to 2001, which are the years alphabetized by author firstname. See sections 1 and 4 above. BCF doesn't evidently maintain any list of winners online beforecolumbusfoundation.com) and may have none offline.


 * The Booksellers (bookweb.org) list, currently 1980-2012, is alphabetical by surname for 1980-2010, i judge hastily. The other list (ankn.uaf.edu), 1980-2001, is largely alpha by surname, perhaps alphabetical in segments where we list only the first segment. So reference to those lists will help anyone who chooses to sort the abbreviated lists of winners that we have for those years. Whoever takes it on should fix the "Author for Title" format too.
 * --P64 (talk) 17:40, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Book Author Pages Links
76.91.18.22 pointed out that the link for book author Joshua Bloom is incorrect. It looks like a number of the book author page links are incorrect. These need to be fixed. There should be a Wikipedia page for each of these authors. Minimally, the name should link to the authors' own home pages outside Wikipedia. Any help on this appreciated.Poetlaureate2010 (talk) 15:38, 13 September 2014 (UTC)
 * I got the process started for the "Current Rendition."Poetlaureate2010 (talk) 17:24, 13 September 2014 (UTC)

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