New York ? Nora Roberts, Maya Angelou and former Vice President Al Gore were among the winners of the second annual Quills Awards, a people’s choice for the book world.

Caroline Kennedy received an honorary award Tuesday night for her “commitment to providing support for education and literacy in New York,” while Donald Trump and Harry Connick Jr. served as presenters along with several other celebrities, including Stanley Tucci and Suzanne Somers. The event was held at the American Museum of Natural History, where hundreds dined under a life-sized replica of a blue whale.

Roberts won for best romance book for her novel “Blue Smoke.” Angelou received the poetry award for “Amazing Peace” and Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” was cited for best political-history book. The Book of the Year was Tyler Perry’s “Don’t Make a Black Woman Take off her Earrings.”

Winners were decided by the public, which voted through two online links, www.quillsvote.com and www.quills. msnbc.com. There were no cash prizes.

Created last year by NBC Universal Television Stations and Reed Business Information in an attempt to make publishing awards more glamorous and accessible, the Quills so far have attracted little attention beyond the publishing industry, with virtually no sales impact for nominated books. Comscore Networks Inc., an Internet research firm that monitors Web traffic, was unable to compile any numbers on visits to the Quills links, saying low traffic was the likely reason.

Even several publishers attending Tuesday night’s ceremony acknowledged not voting, among them Alfred A. Knopf head Sonny Mehta, who laughed and said, “I didn’t know if I could vote for my own writers.” (He could.)

Caroline Kennedy speaks after receiving the 2006 Platinum Quill during the second annual Quill Awards at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The awards honor books selected by America's readers in a variety of categories.

Ninety-five nominees in 19 categories were chosen by thousands of booksellers and librarians. They were required to meet one of several possible criteria, such as an appearance on the best-seller list of Borders Group Inc., or a starred review in Publishers Weekly.

The event will be aired on at least 100 NBC stations on Oct. 28.

The Booker Prize

On Tuesday in London, Indian writer Kiran Desai won Britain’s prestigious Man Booker Prize for “The Inheritance of Loss,” a cross-continental saga that moves from the Himalayas to New York City.

Desai, daughter of novelist Anita Desai, had been one of the favorites for the $93,000 prize.

Born in 1971 and educated in India, England and the United States, Desai published her first novel, “Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard,” in 1998.

The 35-year-old, who was considered to be among the front-runners for the prize, held off the challenge of five other nominees, including the favorite Sarah Waters for her novel “The Night Watch”.

The other finalists were “In The Country Of Men,” Hisham Matar’s semi-autobiographical first novel about childhood in Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya; “The Secret River,” Kate Grenville’s tale of life in a 19th-century Australian penal colony; “Carry Me Down,” the story of an unusual boy, by Irish-Australian novelist M.J. Hyland; and “Mother’s Milk,” a portrait of a rich but dysfunctional family by English writer Edward St. Aubyn.