The judging panel for The New Zealand Post Book Awards for Children and Young Adults has just been announced this morning. The judges will be: Bob Kerr, a well-known children's book writer and illustrator who will convene the panel. Also Julie Harper, bookseller at Jabberwocky Childrens bookshop in Auckland and active member of the Children's Literature Foundation; and finally, rather bizarrely, Jackie Clarke. Jackie has however, been involved in kids theatre for years and in the Books in Home scheme. Te Reo Maori advisor Hana Pomare will be helping out, too.

These guys are going to have to come up with the 20 best kids books of the year, from a list of over 100 in the categories of Young Adult Fiction, Junior Fiction, Picture Book and Non Fiction. The 20 finalists will be announced on 9 February 2005. The books will then be the focus for festival events and school curriculum activities beginning on 9 May. The winners are to be announced on Tuesday 19 May 2005.

But that’s not all. The nice awards people have done some serious work upgrading ... well, just about everything about the awards by the sound of it. We got quite excited by it all ourselves.

First up, they have more money! If school pupils vote in the Children's Choice Award, they go into the draw to win $1000 worth of Booksellers Tokens for their school library, which is four times the value of previous years. But even better, they have their very own new website, which will be instrumental in making available a whole lot of groovy new stuff.

Teachers and librarians will have at their finger-tips ready-made classroom activities for all 20 finalists, available free on the site. The activities will be downloadable for class use with no restrictions on reproduction or distribution. There will also be loads of information about each book and author, and all upcoming events during the festival.

Children and teenagers will be able to post reviews of finalist books on the website, using images of book covers and author photos which will be available on-line. This of course will engender serious literary discussion on the monkey bars ...

Well, p’raps that might be a bit much to hope for. But I definitely know of one 7-and-a-half-year-old who will give most internet-based things a go, and if it also involves reading, well, so much the better.