The BoD Author Award is a door opener for a career as an author: BoD has handed out the coveted and prestigious award, which carries a value of €5,000, every year at the Leipzig Book Fair since 2002. However, not only the literary or factual quality of a book is acknowledged, but also its creative cover and book design and, above all, an innovative marketing strategy as well as the book’s commercial success so far.

The jury consists of three members: Rainer Groothuis, book designer and general manager of Germany’s largest marketing and communication agency in the book industry; Kirsten Landt, manager of Germany’s largest Thalia bookstore chain branch in Hamburg; and Anne Tente, who holds a degree in literature and works as a fiction editor at Heyne Taschenbuch Verlag. They look forward to your application. The award is always open to those BoD authors who have published a title with BoD between two Leipzig Book Fairs.

Books on Demand GmbH was one of more than 1,200 companies which participated in the “365 Places in the Land of Ideas” competition in 2006. The “Germany – Land of Ideas” business location initiative solicited applications from all over Germany in its search for places where innovations could be created and developed. The jury, which was chaired by Prof. Martin Roth, director general of the State Art Collections Dresden, voted Books on Demand one of these 365 places.

Following the motto “Gutenberg’s successors”, Books on Demand GmbH has represented the book industry in the “Land of Ideas in 2006” since then. BoD was distinguished for its innovative idea of printing books only once they have been ordered: a method which allows all authors to get their books into bookstores. By now more than 10,000 authors have published their work with BoD in this manner. Five hundred and fifty years after Gutenberg, the jury opined, book printing, the idea of a millennium, is thus taking on a new dimension. Everyone becomes able to print and publish a book. It “only” has to be written yet.

The book "AUFTRÄGE" is already the second publication in the "Zürcher Jahrbuch der Künste" (Zurich Yearbook of the Arts) series issued by the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Zürich (HGKZ) (Zurich University of the Arts). The volume sheds an entirely new light on the relationship between “free” and “applied”, attributes which have been perceived as a contrast in the arts for more than a century. (It is not least the choice of production and distribution method for the self-published book as well as the cooperation with BoD that reflect this issue impressively.)

The various alternatives offered by digital printing have made it possible to create a book project with a sophisticated design which shows the complex possibilities offered by the innovations in today’s printing technology. The jury acknowledged this special achievement by awarding the book second prize in the category Book Project. It explained its decision by praising the unusual design of the book, specifically the visual and typographical realization of its subject matter.

In December 2004, Books on Demand, jointly with Lyrikedition 2000, celebrated the first BoD title by an author who had received the highest literary award – the Nobel Prize. Today Elfriede Jelinek's early volume of poetry is one of the formerly out-of-print titles which would no longer be available without BoD and the initiative of the publisher Lyrikedition 2000. The volume, which contains poems from 1966 to 1968, was first published in 1980. The early poems of this volume already show clear marks of the language virtuoso into whom Jelinek was to develop, gaining an entirely new form of authenticity through their linguistic deconstruction and montage method. (Jelinek is considered to be a  controversial author. A fierce debate has been going on for years between those who feel provoked by her books as well as by her political opinion and aggressiveness, and those who celebrate her as a great linguistic artist.) The Nobel Committee honoured in Jelinek a controversial writer who probes the limits of the German language in her entire oeuvre. The jury explained its decision by stating that Elfriede Jelinek was receiving the award for “the musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and dramas which reveal the absurdity and compelling power of social clichés with unique linguistic passion”.

In 2007, the real estate manager and wine connoisseur Thomas Hesele received the renowned Gourmand World Cookbook Award for the second time in four years for his wine vintage guide Die Weinjahrgänge Bordeaux. This guide is a solid decision-making and purchase aid for professionals as well as for newcomers: it shows the quality of the vintages in the different appellations at a glance, starting with 1970. Applying a specifically developed five-star system, the vinophile author does not rate special wines and vintners, as is usual, but rather the vintage of a specific region.

Thomas Hesele has also impressed the professional world by providing a valuable overview for laypeople with his three other BoD publications, "Die Weinjahrgänge Spanien und Portugal" (distinguished with the 2003 World Cookbook Award), "Die Weinjahrgänge Deutschland, Schweiz, Österreich", and "Die spanischen Weinjahrgänge".

Buchstaben, Bilder, Bytes (Letters, Images, Bytes) contains selected articles on the issue of “perception” at the interface between analogue and digital media. The book, which came about as part of an interdisciplinary student project at Basel University in close cooperation with the book designers Michael Heimann and Dorothea Weishaupt, impressed the jury with its well thought-through overall typographical concept, and was ranked seventh among the contestants in 2004.

The Computerworld Smithsonian Award has been handed out since 1989. Originating in an initiative of the Smithsonian Institute and the magazine Computerworld, it now also bears the name Computerworld Honours Programme.

In 1999 the Libri subsidiary Books on Demand received the Computerworld Smithsonian Award in the category Manufacturing in Washington, D.C. Daniel Morrow, executive director of the Smithsonian Award Programme, said in his eulogy during the gala at the National Building Museum in Washington: "With its innovative technology concept for Books on Demand, Libri stands out among this year's remarkable applicants."

Books on Demand took a clear lead in front of its competitors in two advance votings. The company received the award for its complex overall “books on demand” concept, according to which books are no longer physically on the bookshelf but are stored on the server as electronic camera-ready copy. This method impressed the committee with its diverse advantages for authors and end customers. For the first time books are produced as they are ordered, and delivered “just in time” via Libri’s shipping department, starting with a print run of one copy. The hardware and software solutions for this method were developed in close cooperation with the technology corporation Xerox.