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 …
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 …
The month-long Amar Ekushey Boi Mela, aka the Dhaka Book Fair, has wound up for another year, and it’s improbable any records have been broken as bad weather and bad luck worked in tandem to undermine the event. It got so bad that the event was extended an extra two days, concluding Saturday March 2 Read More …
Two major global book fairs, both on target to set new records for attendance and sales, had their hopes dashed this weekend as fire broke out at the Casablanca International Book Fair in Morocco and floods devastated the Amar Ekushey Boi Mela, the month long national book fair in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The storm swept across Read More …
India’s Kolkata International Book Fair wound up earlier this week and the numbers are in: 2.3 million visitors spent 230 million rupees (US$ 3.2 million) on books in twelve days. Given the price of books in India the volume must have been huge. This just weeks after 900,000 turned out to the New Delhi World Book Read More …
If it’s February it must be the Amar Ekushey Boi Mela in Bangladesh, an annual festival of books that runs the entire month of February. Last year the boi mela sold books to the USD equivalent of just shy of $10 million. But hands up anyone who has Bangladesh on their book market bucket list? Read More …
When one thinks of the worlds biggest book fairs its unlikely Bangladesh is on the list of prime candidates, but in fact the annual Amar Ekushey Boi Mela in Dhaka is well up there in the running, not least for its duration. The boi mela lasts the entire month of February. The annual book festival Read More …
It’s been a while since the release of The Cursed Child, the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and the Hogwarts Library digital audiobook, and revenues have been hit, as The Bookseller reports. In the period, revenues were £32.8m, down from the previous year’s £40.3m. Pretax profit was £3.4m, compared with £3.5m. Nevertheless, the result showed that Pottermore Read More …
On any given day there are more book fairs and festivals happening around the world than anyone could keep track of, where readers, authors and publishers congregate, seemingly oblivious to our quaint western notion that, if books aren’t being sold in bookstores or on Amazon then, well, nobody in that country reads. Take the 8th 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 …
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 …
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. I also have a rule that I don’t repeat a story published elsewhere on the western English-language publishing circuit unless I can offer some Read More …
