The Royal Wedding gets a colouring book; money laundering reaches book publishing; comic book gets Ridley Scott treatment; the world remembers Stephen Hawking. This is A Week In Book News.
Ridley Scott’s first comic book movie
Brace yourself, comic book fans.
Ridley Scott is to direct his first ever comic book movie. The entertainment media has reported that Scott will be making a film for Fox based on the comic book series Queen & Country by Greg Rucka.
The series focuses on a fictional British Secret Intelligence Service and a female protagonist called Tara Chance.
Queen & Country is published by Oni Press. Rucka has also been published by DC, Marvel and Dark Horse for his works on series such as Superman, Elektra, X-Men and Wonder Woman.
Money laundering via self-published books
Stranger than fiction it is: criminals have figured out a new way to launder money using the self-publishing book platform. Fortune reports that crooks use the stolen identities of authors or users of Amazon print book services to upload fake paperback titles to the online bookshop, and then buy these fake books at ridiculously high prices (“$555 a copy”). The payments are then channeled to the crooks’ bank accounts where they can withdraw the cash.
Authors discover these activities only when they receive tax forms detailing their self-employment earnings that include money allegedly made from the transactions of these fraudulent books.
This sounds very much like money laundering via online gambling where a player – or a crook – can bet up to €10,000 on a single slot machine game. The money can later be cashed out after an alleged ‘win’. Who bets that kind of money on a slot machine anyway? It’s not even a poker game.
Royal Wedding colouring book
Apparently, this is a thing. Trapeze, an imprint of Orion Publishing, has bought the world rights to Adam Rushton’s Royal Wedding colouring book.
The Royal Wedding Colouring Book tells the story of the romance between Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. The book will be released as a £5.99 paperback in April 2018, a month before the wedding which will take place on 19 May 2018.
According to Orion Publishing, illustrator Adam Rushton has worked in graphic design for two decades, “starting out at a well-known greeting card company in his early years”. Previous works include illustrations for books such as Where’s Boris?.
Farewell, Star Man
The world mourns the passing of Stephen Hawking, the physicist best known for introducing cosmology to the masses through his book, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. He died age 76 on 14 March 2018.
His theory on space and time fascinated in particular sci-fi and fantasy fans, although Hawking himself did not believe in the possibility of time travel.
Hawking was one of the few contemporary scientists who figured prominently in popular culture. He starred as himself in the 1993 Star Trek episode Descent, in which he played poker with USS Enterprise’s most famous android, Lieutenant Commander Data.
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