7.7 million audiobooks users in France. 51% are first-timers. French audiobook listeners read more print books than regular readers

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The first survey of French audiobook users this year shows a significant increase in audiobook take-up compared to a year ago. According to the OpinionWay survey, conducted between 30 January 30 and 19 February,14% of French citizens aged 15 and over have listened to an audiobook while a further 7% intend to. Younger booklovers lead Read More …

23 outright sales and 408 pending. Indonesia’s London Book Fair title count exceeds expectations, but still a key opportunity missed

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As the Market Focus country at the 2019 London Book Fair, Indonesia’s National Book Committee was hoping to secure 50 title sales to add to the 1,200 it has collected since its establishment in 2015. As the fair drew to a close 23 sales had already been signed on the spot, and with 12 countries Read More …

From a mortgaged dagger to World Book Capital – books are woven into Sharjah’s history and DNA

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We’re weeks away from the Emirate of Sharjah, part of the United Arab Emirates, assuming the title of UNESCO Word Book Capital, and it’s likely there’s never been a more fitting choice. Not because this is the first Arab nation – in fact Egypt and Lebanon have both carried the title in past years. Nor Read More …

Publishers stand to lose sales worth $46,000 per day thanks to poor search abilities of smartspeakers

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For a while it seemed like smartspeakers were the new black of digital audio, driving sales ever higher. But a new study by Score Publishing suggests all is not well in the smartspeaker market, with book-related search queries at best delivering accurate results only 72.5% of the time, and the one we’d expect to do Read More …

Norwegian online bookstore wins Finland’s Dragon’s Den variation Polar Bear Pitching with an icy proposition

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Most people reading this will know of the TV series Dragon’s Den, or Shark Tank, or any of thirty localised variations of the show where entrepreneurs pitch their business ideas to risk-averse investors. Originating in Japan as Money Tigers, Dragons Den has been reproduced around the globe from Afghanistan to Vietnam, and occasionally publishing opportunities Read More …

While Audible looks the other way, locked into Amazon’s roadmap, Poland’s Audioteka joins Storytel in Turkey, partners with Caffe Nero

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Audible, like CreateSpace, began life independently of Amazon, and by the time Amazon acquired them both, these two savvy publishing ventures had carved niches that, for the longest while, Amazon was happy to leave alone. Everyone was happy. But Audible, an ambitious, globally-minded operation, soon found that its international aspirations were beholden to Amazon’s roadmap. Read More …

Dubai’s Booklava wins The Bookseller’s AudioBook Publisher of the Year Award

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Unsurprisingly, audiobooks have been a hot topic at the London Book Fair, which finishes today, but it wasn’t the usual suspects, Audible and Storytel, that grabbed the headlines. The Bookseller’s Audiobook producer of the Year Award went to an audio outfit in the United Arab Emirates, which may come as a surprise to those who Read More …

International Publishers Association announces line-up for 2nd IPA Africa Seminar in Nairobi

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If last year’s inaugural IPA Africa Seminar in Lagos was a much needed wake-up call to a global publishing industry that had largely ignored the world’s second largest continent, the 2nd incarnation in Nairobi in June will elevate the debate to the next level. From the IPA press release: Leading figures in African writing and Read More …

StreetLib completes Pan-African digital footprint. Launches a publisher portal for every nation in Africa. 800m Africans online by 2025

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Italy-based digital books distributor and publishing facilitator StreetLib has completed the third stage of its global roll-out, and now offers an author and publisher portal for every nation in Africa. The New Publishing Standard (TNPS) is published by StreetLib to further the debate about the global book markets. TNPS is not a StreetLib promotion tool. Read More …

Mexico’s Palacio de Minería International Book Fair attracts a crowd of 144,000

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The 40th Feria Internacional del Libro del Palacio de Minería wound up earlier this week, and provides another example of the myriad book fairs around the world that attract booklovers that spend money on books outside the traditional bookselling infrastructure of book stores and online stores. Book sales that therefore rarely get noticed by the Read More …

Oman’s Muscat International Book Fair clocks over 1 million visitors for second year running

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When Oman’s Muscat International Book Fair scraped across the magical one million visitors mark in 2018, by just 60, clocking an elegant attendance of 1,000,060, the big question was, could it be repeated? Oman, after all, is an Arab nation in the Middle East. Hardly a hot bed of publishing and reading. Or so we’re Read More …

French ebook store Numilog rolls out pay-per-page reading for consumers. Will it be vulnerable to the problems that Kindle Unlimited faces?

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The French ebook and audio store Numilog has been focused primarily, although not exclusively, on academic and reference books, which can be expensive to buy and often are not read end to end. That can be a deterrent to buying, unless you really need to, and so Numilog has rolled out a new consumption model Read More …

Jo Nesbø heads UK’s bestselling translated fiction list in 2018

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Brexit may be the daily headline in the UK right now, but British readers still like their European authors. According to research commissioned by the Man Booker International Prize (as reported in the UK’s The Bookseller), sales of translated fiction grew 5.5% last year, led by authors like Norway’s Jo Nesbø, Sweden’s David Lagercrantz and Read More …

Discount ebook deals mailing list BookBub finally adds audiobooks. Launches Chirp in partnership with Findaway

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One of the biggest gripes about Amazon’s ACX, the self-publishing arm of Audible and very much the go to place for indie authors to distribute their audiobooks, is that Amazon calls the shots on pricing. Among the many appeals of new kid on the block Findaway is that the author has a semblance of control. Read More …

Storytel Poland: An entertainment platform, not a bookstore with a subscription option

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This is a translation of an  original article by Daniel Kotliński, which can be found here. An entertainment platform, not a bookstore with a subscription option. Prospects and plans for the development of the Storytel brand. Like storytelling itself, audio has limitless possibilities. Does an application for audio materials that has been out on the Polish market Read More …

13-year-old Kenyan girl the youngest in the final running for the Afro Young Adult writing contest

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Given the shortage of YA fiction for African readers, the Goethe Institute has been supporting a contest to find more YA writers, and chose to target Africa’s young adults themselves to find the new talent. 435 submissions from 13-19 year old authors across Africa were entered for the Afro Young Adult writing competition. Those 435 Read More …

Bangladesh Amar Ekushey Boi Mela just misses $10 million in book sales despite floods and chaos

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It was touch and go whether the national book fair of Bangladesh, the Amar Ekushey Boi Mela, could keep up its growth as severe weather flooded the grounds, damaged books and deterred visitors. Even with a two day extension to make up for some of the lost time it seemed improbable we were going to Read More …

“A voiceless nation, too busy staying alive to create literary pieces in foreign languages”

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In what is believed to be a first, a Kurdish woman will be publishing a novel written in English. Reports Publishers Weekly in its Global Deals email: In a three-way auction, Chelsea Hutchens won world rights (excluding Canada) to Warrior Butterflies, the debut novel by Ava Homa, which both the author and her agent, Chris Read More …

Digital serial books subscription service Serial Box raises $4.5 million. Partners with Marvel. But still we’ll be told people are reading less

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Founded in 2015 by former Penguin Random House global digital director Molly Barton and co-founder Julian Yap, Serial Box is just one more example in a never ending list of digital operators that are stealing readers from mainstream bookstores and online stores, creating the fallacy that people are reading less. Serial Box is a clever play on Read More …

Call for Ekushey Boi Mela to be place under control of Bangladeshi publishers guilds

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If the final numbers for the month long Amar Ekushey Boi Mela actually compared favourably with last year – a remarkable feat given the weather – still there is much dissatisfaction with the way the Bangla Academy has handled things. Now Professor Emeritus Serajul Islam Choudhury has said it is time for a change. Noting Read More …