LibraryThing: State of the Thing - December

LibraryThing: State of the Thing Dear {NAME}, Welcome to the December State of the Thing. We've got a new employee (me!), updates to groups, 1,973 free books, and another $1,000 employee book bounty. If you'd rather receive a plain-text version, [edit your email preferences](. You can also read it [online](. You can like LibraryThing on [Facebook]( and follow [@LibraryThing]( on Twitter for up-to-the-minute site news and updates. Hello LibraryThing! I'm Meg, and I'll be writing State of the Thing from now on and handling much of LibraryThing's communication with members generally. I come to LibraryThing from the world of school libraries where I spent over a decade fostering a love of reading and building communities of readers. I’m excited to continue that work here. If you want to learn more about me, including my work as an author, please visit my [LibraryThing profile](, [author page](, [Litsy profile](, or [website](). You can also read the [full announcement on the LibraryThing blog](. And now, on with the Thing! LibraryThing News Book Recommendations Requests. We have created a new official group: [Book Recommendations Requests](, a place for members to ask for book recommendations. If you want help finding a new book to read yourself or need guidance in picking one for someone else, this is the place to go. Some recent requests: - [Light mysteries that aren’t cozies](: seeking “something between cozy and psycho.” - [Recommendations for an Elderly Lady](: seeking easy-to-follow books for a 91 year-old. - [Fantasy or science fiction with conscious dogs (or cats)]( Top Books of 2020. The end of the year means a veritable cornucopia of Best Books lists. LibraryThing is joining the deluge with not one but two lists. LT staffers share their top reads of 2020 over on the [LibraryThing Blog](. Members can contribute to our [community list](. SantaThing and Holiday Cards. SantaThing is a Secret Santa style gift exchange where LibraryThing and Litsy members give each other books. It’s been a rough year for independent bookstores, so for our fourteenth annual SantaThing we chose some of our favorite indies to fulfill the print orders. This year over 450 members participated, and books are being dropped on doorsteps as you read this. Our other holiday tradition is a holiday card exchange among members. This year, 190 members sent almost 1,200 cards on their merry way across the globe. Remote Job: Find LibraryThing A Great Developer [HireDeveloper_3](LibraryThing is hunting for a full-time developer. This is a remote position open to anyone eligible to work in the U.S. This position will bring LibraryThing up to three full-time developers and will mean that I am no longer the newest new employee. This developer will help bring LibraryThing where it needs to go, but we need your help to spread this opportunity to interested candidates. Best of all, if you can find LibraryThing that developer, you get $1,000 in books from a bookstore of your choice. Think you might be a good fit or have someone to recommend? You can [read more about the job on the blog](. Free Books! Early Reviewers is our program where you can win free advance copies of books to read and review. [Sign up to request books](. Our December batch of Early Reviewers has 1,973 copies of 55 books. The deadline to request a book is December 28, 6pm Eastern time. Book World News BEA Cancelled Forever... Maybe On the first of this month, [BookExpo announced]( that BookExpo America (BEA), BookCon, and UnBound would not take place in 2021 and that the organization was taking a break to “pause, review, and rebuild.” BEA was the biggest book publishing trade show in the United States. The in-person events were cancelled in 2020 due to the pandemic, [replaced with BookConline](. While many took this most recent news as [an indication that BEA was no more](, the announcement promises that the events will return in new formats. What that means is anyone’s guess. For now, the [BookExpo website]( promises that they are working on something new: “We're excited to show you what we're building for the book industry and our reading community.” Penguin Random House to buy Simon & Schuster In late November, Simon & Schuster’s parent company, ViacomCBS, [announced it had agreed to sell the publisher]( to Penguin Random House (PRH) for more than $2 billion. Owned by German company Bertelsmann, PRH is currently the largest publisher in the United States while S&S is the third largest. The sale will be reviewed by President-Elect Biden’s administration amidst concerns about the new behemoth having a monopoly on publishing in the U.S. The Author’s Guild [opposes the deal]( citing fears that the merger would diminish the number of opportunities for writers. Writing in [The Atlantic](, [Melville House]( publisher Dennis Johnson argued, “The monstrously big PRH-S&S will be a threat to all the stuff about the book business that most of us in it champion but are often too shy to shout about—free speech, art making, and perfecting and preserving democracy.” PW’s Person of the Year: The Book Business Worker Instead of naming an individual as their person of the year, Publisher’s Weekly went ahead and recognized the whole solar system of book business workers. The [article explaining the choice]( serves as a thorough summary of the year in publishing. In 2020 the industry was rocked by the pandemic and faced internal and external scrutiny around systemic racism. The PW editorial team praised the way publishing staff, librarians, and book workers faced these challenges head-on, and expressed cautious optimism for the future. Hot This Month - [A Promised Land]( by [Barack Obama]( - [Ready Player Two: A Novel]( by [Ernest Cline]( - [Daylight]( by [David Baldacci]( - [The Law of Innocence]( by [Michael Connelly]( - [The Ickabog]( by [J. K. Rowling]( - [Rhythm of War]( by [Brandon Sanderson]( - [Moonflower Murders]( by [Anthony Horowitz]( - [In a Holidaze]( by [Christina Lauren]( - [Greenlights]( by [Matthew McConaughey]( - [Fortune and Glory]( by [Janet Evanovich]( - [The Kingdom]( by [Jo Nesbo]( - [A Sky Beyond the Storm]( by [Sabaa Tahir]( - [The Best of Me]( by [David Sedaris]( - [The Ministry For the Future]( by [Kim Stanley Robinson]( - [These Violent Delights (These Violent Delights, #1)]( by [Chloe Gong]( - [V2]( by [Robert Harris]( - [White Ivy]( by [Susie Yang]( - [Shuggie Bain]( by [Douglas Stuart]( - [The Cold Millions]( by [Jess Walter]( - [We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence]( by [Becky Cooper]( TinyCat [TinyCat]( is the online catalog for small libraries, created by LibraryThing. It turns your existing LibraryThing account into a simple, professional, web-based catalog. Every month, one special TinyCat library is selected as the Library of the Month. For December, we are highlighting the [Anomaly Archives Library]( ). The Anomaly Archives is dedicated to collecting and preserving scientific research into anomalous phenomena such as UFOs, parapsychology, cryptozoology, and more. [AnomalyArchive]Kristi interviewed SMiles Lewis, founder of Anomaly Archives on the [LibraryThing Blog]( this month. Check out this excerpt: Tell us some interesting things about how you support your community. Far too often, the personal libraries and research materials of researchers—including correspondence among researchers and witnesses—of these mysterious phenomena end up lost or thrown into landfills by family who don’t recognize the importance of such legacy materials. Or such collections end up being sold online via eBay or passed along to other researchers who may not share the material with others nor properly protect and preserve the materials. That’s where we, and the small network of similar anomalous archives (see our “Other Archives” online directory), come in. You can find the full interview on the [LibraryThing Blog](. TinyCat Webinars: Our last live webinar of the year was on December 9, but you can watch one of our recorded sessions anytime from [LibraryThing’s YouTube channel](. That’s also where you can find Tiny Tutorials for using TinyCat and LibraryThing. Live webinar sessions will start back up on January 13, so stay tuned for details. If you’d like to schedule a webinar at another time or if you have other questions about TinyCat, you can reach Kristi at tinycat@librarything.com. That’s all for the Thing this month! On behalf of everyone at LibraryThing, I wish you a wonderful year of reading in 2021! —Â Meg This message was sent to {NAME}. Click to [edit your email preferences or unsubscribe from future emails](.