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 …
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 …
Unless you’ve been riding camels in the Gobi Desert in Outer Mongolia, snorkeling in the warm seas around Trinidad & Tobago, on safari in Botswana’s Kalahari, or relaxing on the Caspian Sea beaches of Azerbaijan, you cannot help but have noticed it was World Book Day this week. In fact, even if you were in Read More …
Happy New Year! In Bangladesh, that is, where 1425 has just begun, and among myriad celebrations to celebrate the New Year is a ten day book fair organised by the Bangla Academy. A book fair in Bangladesh? If you’re new here you could be forgiven for wondering if they even have bookstores in Bangladesh, such Read More …
The London Book Fair is underway, and there’s no question it’s one of the most important trade book fairs of the year. But these big trade events (the London Book Fair, the New York Book Expo, the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, the Frankfurt Book Fair, etc,) are just that – trade-focussed events where public access 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. But if you’re reading TNPS in the first place you probably share my obsession with all things international publishing, and would no doubt enjoy Read More …
I so hate this time of year. April Fool’s Day is a minefield for international news, where time zones painfully elongate the period in which improbable news stories may or may not be true, leaving me needing to treble-check sources and then I’m still juggling the odds I’ve fallen for some prank news story. So Read More …
There are any number of contenders for the claim to be the most unlikely book event ever. But a front runner for the crown must be the Indonesia Big Bad Wolf event this year. Indonesia’s biggest book sale is underway right now in Jakarta, and as ever its 24-hour non-stop book-buying. Last year 40,000 a day 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. But if you’re reading TNPS in the first place you probably share my obsession with all things international publishing, and would no doubt enjoy Read More …
The Big Bad Wolf debuted in the Philippines last month, taking 2 million books to the World Trade Centre in Pasay City, Manila for a ten day non-stop (literally, 24/7) book sale that had Filipinos queuing for two hours just to pay for the books they had selected. As one Filipino booklover reminisced in the Read More …
