For those who don’t get the chance to open all the regular email notifications from TNPS, a summary of the key stories covered in the past seven days.
Our week began with news that Kay Thompson’s Eloise books, first published in the mid-twentieth century, have found a new lease of life, giving us “a reminder of the enduring power of publishing’s backlist.”
Magazines going digital are hardly news in themselves these days, but CACTUS’s Blank:a print journal’s joining the digital circuit caught our eye because of its reach. Blank:a is published in English, Chinese, Japanese and Korean, offering niche service to universities around the world. The digital version will allow many more parties in any more countries to access the journal for the first time.
And staying with Chinese, China Radio International partnered with Malaysia’s Institute of Language and Literature.
TNPS is about global digital opportunities and we don’t limit ourselves to the obvious. This week we covered the Dubai International Content Market (worth $200 million) and the pending launch of the animated film Spies In Disguise in Arabic. Relevance to publishers? Check out the post.
Hardly a week goes by without Storytel making our news list, and this week was no exception. Storytel’s new Media Centre (yes, many Swedes learned their English with some time in the UK so use British English spellings), thanks to a partnership with Clipsource.
Comics and superheroes were in focus this week at TNPS as Brazil’s São Paulo Comic Experience (CCXP) broke world records for a comics event, with 280,000 turning out.
And in Denmark, Podimo, the Danish start-up that aims to be Europe’s Netflix for podcasts”, clocked 75,000 subscribers in its early days. Many will be still at the free sample stage, so we don’t know how many stay on and pay, but this is a clear sign of the keen interest in dedicated podcasts service. Podimo also launched in Germany in November.
For self-publishers, the now US-based aggregator PublishDrive, which originated in Hungary, added two new channels to its distribution portfolio.
In SE Asia the tenth anniversary of the world’s biggest book sale, Big Bad Wolf, saw a 4.5 million book event in Malaysia and the first event for 2020 announced in Myanmar. And we spotted a clear indication, not yet official, that Big Bad Wolf will be launching its first ever sale in Cambodia in the New Year.
Finally this week TNPS covered the news that Canada-based Wattpad is taking on a second Canadian HQ, in Halifax.
Follow TNPS on twitter (@thenewpubstd) for daily links to myriad more global publishing stories we simply don’t have time to cover here.
