Nosy Crow, Profile and PRH among FutureBook's innovation winners

Nosy Crow m.d. Kate Wilson has been named most inspiring digital publishing person at the FutureBook Innovation Awards.

Wilson was named as the winner at a ceremony held at the FutureBook Conference in central London this afternoon (14th November), beating a shortlist that also included Unbound founder Dan Kieran, agent Simon Trewin, indie/hybrid author Hugh Howey and Hachette Book Group c.e.o. Michael Pietsch.

The award was sponsored by the Frankfurt Book Fair.

The afternoon was a successful one for the children's publisher, with Nosy Crow's Jack and the Beanstalk picking up the award for best children's fiction digital book, a title described by judge and consultant Anna Rafferty as "charming, witty and compulsive". The award for best children's non-fiction digital book went to Lets Do Mental Maths 6-7 by Bloomsbury which was credited with using the digital experience to take on a subject that was "hard to tackle".

On the adult side, the best fiction digital book award went to Profile's 80 Days, an interactive take on Jules Verne's original tale. The Bookseller editor Philip Jones said: "The judges were impressed at how the publisher had used to the backdrop of the story to bring in gaming elements to complement, rather than distract from, the original text." Harlequin's The Chatsfield was highly commended. The best non-fiction digital book award went to the Collins Bird Guide, a product which "used the device and its content to the best advantage", according to Rafferty.

The best use of digital in a marketing campaign award went to Penguin Random House's "James Patterson is Missing" campaign, with HarperCollins' virtual romance festival and Hodder & Stoughton's The Right Sort Twitter story, written by David Mitchell, both highly commended. Rafferty said the James Patterson deserved to win "as it was a perfect example of smart brand management in an entirely contextually relevant way - it made great use of the technology, the readership, the author and the content."

The best publisher website award was divided into two this year, with an award for best publisher website, and an award for best consumer-facing website. Unbound.com claimed the best website award, with Jones calling the crowd-funding site "a triumph of design, implementation, and effectiveness". The best consumer-facing site was Hardie Grant's Cooked, which judge Shane Richmond called: "An inviting and modern design that truly does justice to the wealth of content available."

Lost My Name, a site which allows customers to create personalised children's books, was named as best start-up. Jones said: "The judges were impressed by Lost My Name’s direct-to-consumer offer, dedication to quality and effectiveness of the execution, both online and in print." 

Meanwhile, the best technology innovation award, sponsored by ePubDirect, went to Snapplify. Joe Lennon, c.t.o. of ePubDirect said: "We were impressed by Snapplify on many levels - the importance of the problems they are solving, the technology they are building to do so, and the elegance of how they deliver content where bandwidth is limited or not available at all."

The FutureBook Innovation Awards are now in their fifth year, and were the first such awards to award innovation and excellence within the digital publishing community. Previous winners of the awards include Touch Press, Nosy Crow, Faber, Random House and Rough Guides. Wilson follows Harlequin’s Tim Cooper, Faber’s Stephen Page, Rebecca Smart, now of Ebury, and last year’s popular winner Sourcebooks publisher and chief executive Dominique Raccah.