Four Testaments placed well in the recent Independent Publishers Book Award announcements, a silver medal in the Religion Category. Three Testaments: Torah, Gospel and Quran was published in 2012 and received the IPPY gold medal for the best religious book a year and a bit later in 2014, but the competition was fierce in 2017 for "bragging rights" as the best religious book published in 2016.

IPPYs are not really "the Academy Awards of the book industry," as often touted, since books published by the big five publicly traded publishers, Hachette, HarperColins, MacMillan, Random House and Simon & Schuster are not eligible. But books by over five thousand privately owned English language publishers worldwide (like Roman & Littlefield, McGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, etc.) are all eligible, along with books by all the world’s religious publishers (Eerdmans etc.) and University Presses (Oxford etc.), to mention other recent winners.

The 2017 award gala takes place in NYC at the Copacabana on Times Square on the eve of Book Expo America in June. Jenny will accompany me there, along with contributors attending Book Expo America or living near enough to join us at our table. The rule is that contributors prominent enough to be listed on the cover also receive copies of the medal, so silvers will go to David Bruce, Francis Clooney, K. E. Edulgee, Richard Freund, Cyril Glassé, Victor Mair, Jacqueline Mates-Muchin and Arvind Sharma, whether or not they are present.

A paperback edition of Four Testaments: Tao Te Ching, Analects, Dhammapada, Bhagavad Gita is now scheduled for the autumn of 2017, to be followed by boxed sets of 3T & 4T in early 2018. There is enough overlap between the two volumes that a slightly abridged one-volume edition is now contemplated for 2019 with all the scriptures and most of our commentary under the title Seven Testaments of World Religions.