Monday News: FutureBookHack UK Hackathon, Tribune spinning off newspapers, bookstore literally dumps books, and women writing crime fiction
FutureBookHack Category Winners revealed – Almost 100 hackers gathered at the University College London for the first FutureBookHack. Organized by The Bookseller and intended to address challenges set by publishers, the event spanned this past weekend and yielded a number of projects for both print and digital publishing. An overall prize of £5,000 will be awarded on Thursday, June 19th.
In the category of best use of print assets, the winner was “Black Book”, described as an adult pop-up book which puts the digital into the physical world.
Highly commended were projects “6 Degrees”, which traces the books the authors you like choose to read, and the links between them; “Tinder for Books”, which offers snippets of text to tempt you before showing you the book jacket, so you judge it on its inside merits rather than its superficial good looks; “Mood Nights”, which enables children’s stories to be read in different ways according to whether they want to be amused or frightened; and “Book Signal”, which enables people to read books together or to one another online. –The Bookseller
Tribune Publishing to borrow $350 million – Although the focus of this story is on the Tribune’s plans to borrow $350 million $25 million more than anticipated, the underlying transactions may be most significant, namely the plan to spin off the Tribune’s newspapers to current shareholders (forming Tribune Publishing) following a failed sale attempt last year. Apparently $275 million of the loan will be used for a dividend to the parent company as part of the deal. One of the company’s primary owners is currently attempting to get out of its investment in the Tribune Co. None of this strikes me as good news for the newspapers.
Tribune last year attempted to sell the newspaper group, which includes the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and Baltimore Sun, but abandoned those efforts and opted instead to spin off the publishing entity to its existing shareholders and list shares of the new company on the New York Stock Exchange. Tribune is keeping the broadcast operations, where prospects for profit increases are better than in the declining newspaper industry, and some of the other more lucrative assets, such as the real estate holdings. –Crain’s Chicago Business
Derry bookshop’s huge bankrupt stock left in skip – The Bookworm bookshop in Derry (aka Londonberry) declared bankruptcy in 2012, but its stock was just recently unloaded — literally unloaded into a dumpster in front of the shop, 100,000 books in total. In many ways a very sad situation, although the fact that people were so anxious to pick up books did at least indicate that print books still hold significance for people, if not sufficient value.
The news comes after figures in February from the BooksellersAssociation revealed that the number of independent bookshops in the UK had fallen below 1,000, and that there are now 987 on the country’s high streets, down from 1,028 in February 2013. In 2005, there were 1,535 independent bookshops in the UK, according to the Bookseller. –The Guardian
Sometimes the Toughest Guy in the Room Is a Dame . . . (Part One) – Part one of a two-part article on women in noir and hardboiled crime writing — a very interesting look at how women compare to their male counterparts, how their books have been received and characterized, and how so many stereotypes about how women write crumble when you examine what women are actually writing. Definitely worth reading.
Contemporary women working in the noir and hardboiled tradition use many of the same literary techniques as their male counterparts — adopting the central character’s point of view, often in the form of a first person narrative, and often writing the story as if dictated by the protagonist; they can be as brutal as the boys but generally approach their material from the perspective of a female protagonist, substituting psychological menace for the physical brutality used by their male counterparts. –Pulp Hack Confessions
Putting 100,000 books in a dumpster is so sad.
Why not donate them to a charity? Does Britain have charitable deductions for gifts of goods? Sometimes the convoluted tax code in the US does at least create a good effect in that people do donate things to Goodwill, churches for sales, etc if they have some value, rather than just throw all their clothes, used furniture, books etc into the trash.
Curious to hear from people in Britain about how liquidations are usually handled – what happens when you clear out an old person’s house? Do the cheap but not broken things go in the trash or to a second hand store as a donation? Here, after the good stuff is passed down or sold in an estate sale (we give a fancy name to even a modest tag sale after death), the unsold stuff is often taken to a donation site – the donor can deduct the value from taxes. What’s done there?
Actually, while I adore books, not all are worth keeping.
WAIT! Don’t curse me yet.
What do you do when you have an entire room of autism/childish developement books that are outdated? As in, theories that have been proven wrong and could even be downright harmful?
Or old science magazines, that have maybe one still-relevant article amidst thousands or outdated/harmful material?
Not all book content age the same, and as soon as that can be accepted, as soon as we can get volunteers to wade through slated-for-recycling books in order to pick up the worthy stuff.
Or the USA can keep burning first edition copies of Moby Dick because they need to clean house.
Which yes, actually happened.