News is breaking in Sweden that America’s OverDrive has out-tendered domestic rival Axiell to become the primary ebook distributor for Sweden’s public libraries. Axiell bought out former market leader Elib in 2015 and seemed in an unbeatable position, but didn’t reckon on Rakuten’s growing hunger for the international ebook markets, which offered a “significantly cheaper” Read More …
The winners of the Dominican Republic’s Annual Literature Awards 2018 at the Pedro Henríquez Ureña National Library in Santo Domingo were fewer than expected this year. Síndrome del Iphone by Luis R. Santos took the award in in the Aurora Tavarez Belliard Children and Youth Literature category. In the category of Poetry Salomé Ureña de Read More …
35 libraries from 19 countries were in the running, but just five have been shortlisted for the annual prize to be acclaimed 2018 Public Library of the Year, awarded to a public library that is either newly built or set up in premises not previously used for library purposes. The jury consists of members of Read More …
Storytel today goes live in its thirteenth market, as Italy joins hands with Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Spain, India, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey. Launches in Bulgaria and Mexico planned for later this year. Regulars here at TNPS will not be surprised by the Italy launch, which I first Read More …
When the Audio Publishers Association issued its latest valuation of the US audiobook market last week the $2.5 billion figure understandably made the headlines. We can’t say for certain how accurate that figure may be, as it is, in the words of What’s New In Publishing, the result of the annual US sales survey (conducted Read More …
Against strong competition from Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine and Paula Cocozza’s How to Be Human, a retelling of Shakespeare’s King Lear, set in modern-day India, took the coveted Desmond Elliott Prize for debut fiction this week. Preti Taneja collects £10,000 for We That Are Young, a novel that, according to Outlook India, Read More …
The printing industry in Poland is prospering. The problem does not lie in low reading rates but in payment deadlines and the financial condition of publishers. So runs a headline in Poland’s Investor this week in a post that conveniently leaves ebooks out of the equation as it addresses the fate of Poland’s book printers. Nearly Read More …
Given Libby was Google Play’s ‘Best New App of the Year’ in 2017 and won #1 Apple App Store rating for books and library in May of 2018, it should come as no surprise that the OverDrive app for digital library access is doing well. In 2017 OverDrive clocked some 225 million ebook and audiobook Read More …
Vietnam’s Sunday of Love group has been helping connect the street children of Ho Chi Minh City with books since 2007, but only in 2014 was the first of the “1001 libraries in remote hamlets” built, in Binh Phuoc province. Now there are more than 200 micro-libraries nationwide, fielding from 300 to 1000 books where Read More …
If you know how to use Word, you will be able to write an interactive ebook. Or so says French start-up Adrénalivre, which earlier this year had over 1,000 authors contributing interactive content. Having invested €100,000 in the design and development of interactive story writing software, the start-up has now launched the world’s first subscription Read More …
Fifty years ago this year the Beatles made their first visit to India, and among the highlights of the Bhutan Mountain Echoes Literary Festival in August will be a tribute to that event. This will be the ninth incarnation of the three day Bhutan festival (August 23-25), headed by Naseeruddin Shah, Ratna Pathak and Usha Read More …
We’re just a few days away from the Seoul International Book Fair, which kicks off in South Korea June 20-24, in a five day event expected to draw a crowd of 300,000. Add that to the 700,000 attending Bookfest Malaysia and we’re already looking at our first million booklovers attending literary fairs and festivals this Read More …
In the year 2000 there were just 200,000 people online in Kenya. By 2010 it had risen to almost 4 million. That in itself is an impressive number, giving Kenya in 2010 as many internet users as New Zealand or Ireland have today. Then smartphones arrived. And like many other African nations Kenya effectively by-passed Read More …
Last year the South African Book Development Council took over responsibility for the annual South African Book Fair, previously run by the South African Publishers Association. In doing so the SABF transitioned from a trade event with consumers at the periphery, to a festival of books and publishing.that put African literature back on the map. Read More …
It was just over a month ago, on May 6, that the ten day Kuala Lumpur International Book Fair drew to a close. The KLIBF has pulled in two million visitors every year since 2013. Just 34 days late and Malaysian booklovers are flocking to Kuala Lumpur for the country’s biggest trilingual book event, the Read More …
Unconfirmed rumours in the Indian press suggest Amazon is readying its in-beta Audible India launch for November, to mark the India celebration of Diwali. If true the timeline will catch many by surprise. Amazon is believed to have started progressing Audible India in early 2017 and The Times of India reported Audible IN was widely Read More …
The global publishing market has never been more exciting, and every day myriad publishing stories cross my screen that I’d love to develop here at TNPS, but there simply isn’t time. They do make the TNPS twitter feed, however. Follow TNPS on twitter here: @thenewpubstd. But twitter is an ephemeral beast. If you’re reading TNPS in Read More …
After a lull of a couple of years it looks like Islamic extremists have returned to their most brutal form of censorship – murdering authors and publishers that dare take a different view. In 2015 atheist author and blogger Avijit Roy was murdered at the Amar Ekushey Boi Mela (Dhaka International Book fair), followed by Read More …
Unnoticed and unremarked in the west, Nepal’s 22nd International Book Fair wound up on Saturday after a ten day event that drew a crowd of around 30,000. That’s a disappointing turn out for a country of 30 million, but Nepal is a country where the population is thinly spread – only one city, Kathmandu, has Read More …
With a population of 20 million Sri Lanka is bigger by population than all but eight countries in Europe. That alone ought to put Sri Lanka on the radar of publishers as a lucrative market. Its 16.6 million Sinhala speakers is close to the population of the Netherlands. Its 4.7 million Tamil speakers give it Read More …
