Western Market simply put in a model new merchandising machine — however you’ll should look elsewhere for a soda. Washington’s first e-book merchandising machine opens for enterprise this Saturday within the Foggy Backside meals corridor close to the I Road entrance. The machine holds 23 titles from DC-based authors throughout genres, from image books to poetry.
Brookland-based creator Lauren Woods launched a marketing campaign final fall to deliver this e-book dispenser to life. Impressed by related machines in European practice stations, Woods thought the comfort and curation of a merchandising machine may encourage literacy and produce some consideration to DC writers. “Most individuals wouldn’t begin a bookstore with simply native authors as a result of they assume that can by no means be worthwhile,” says Woods. “So that is my likelihood to check that on a very small scale.”
After reaching her $5,000 fundraising purpose late final yr, Woods confronted issues discovering a location for the inaugural LitBox, as she calls the machine. “I by no means knew that it’s extraordinarily aggressive to get area for a merchandising machine,” she says. However on her strategy to dinner at Founding Farmers earlier this yr, she stopped to take a look at Western Market and noticed an empty area with an outlet that used to deal with an ATM. “I instantly thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s it,” Woods says. She favored the thought of the LitBox standing in a non-retail location the place passersby may spontaneously browse—and contemplate grabbing a e-book to go alongside their lunch. So she reached out to the Western Market staff and so they agreed to take part.
The beginning lineup of literature is targeted on fiction, together with Duet for One by Martha Anne Toll and Rion Amilcar Scott’s brief story assortment The World Doesn’t Require You. This highlight on storytelling was intentional for Woods, who wished to step away from the coverage scorching takes and big-name political memoirs that individuals affiliate with DC publishing. “Nice literature is admittedly about empathy and type of deeply getting exterior of your individual framework and inhabiting one other particular person’s consciousness,” she says. The books will rotate on a few month-to-month foundation, however titles that promote particularly effectively will likely be refilled. The underside row will stay centered on kids’s books.
Woods began the undertaking to deliver one thing optimistic to the DC literary neighborhood at a time when the state of the publishing business has left some individuals feeling dispirited, and she or he says the current slashing of public funding for the humanities has solely made her undertaking really feel extra pertinent. “I need to give writers and other people on this city one thing to really feel enthusiastic about,” she says. “I wished to deliver a little bit little bit of optimism into an in any other case bleak second.”
A launch social gathering for LitBox will happen Could 17 at its Western Market location (2000 Pennsylvania Ave. NW) from 3-4 PM, with readings from featured authors Sandra Beasley, Kyoko Mori, and Martha Anne Toll.
