It was never going to stand up to scrutiny, but whenever publisher sales dip an excuse is rolled out to explain it’s not the industry’s fault. Elections, screen fatigue, social media, bingeing on Netflix… Maybe the publishing industry spokesfolk tasked with putting a spin on the bad news should just number the excuses. Sales down Read More …
Launching with 200 titles, and aiming to add ten new titles each month, BooKids by Nickleodeon is a new ebook subscription service from Viacom International Media Networks. Costing US$7.60 (€6.99) per month and available on Android and iOS and also as an add-on through VIMN’s pay-TV partners, BooKids by Nickelodeon, provides mobile subscribers with access Read More …
Operating in 17 markets – Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, India, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Myanmar, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE, and newly launched in South Africa, OTT video streaming service Viu has partnered with the digital-first mobile reading app Wattpad to create original content from Wattpad’s hundreds of thousands of online Read More …
India’s SonyLIV is the latest video streaming operator to enter the lucrative and fast-growing Middle East market. Uday Sodhi business head of digital, Sony Pictures Networks India, explained, With a bustling young population who are essentially digital first consumers, the Middle East serves as a highly lucrative market for content creators like us to spiral Read More …
Tom Cruise. Natalie Portman, Patrick Stewart… The San Diego Comic Con has been dominated by celebrity news about the latest film, TV, comics and games. The attention economy in action, right? How can publishing compete in this brave new world? But actually it’s a reminder that the games, films, TV and celebrity that grab the Read More …
Neil Gaiman’s Sandman is no stranger to options. The graphic novel has been in line to become a feature film on a few occasions, reports The Hollywood Reporter, but none managed the distance. One reason was summed up by screenwriter Eric Heiserrer, who said in 2016, the best version of this property exists as an HBO Read More …
Not for the first time, a major Hollywood movie opened in China before the US, but hopes of a stellar performance were dashed. The fourth movie in the hugely successful Toy Story franchise went head to head with a re-release of a 2001 film from Japan, and came out behind. In The Hollywood Reporter’s own Read More …
It was back in 2015 that China jumped the US to take top spot for the most cinema goers. Hardly surprising, given China’s 1.4 billion population. But the film industry wallowed in the complacency that in dollar terms – the only metric that matters for some – the US was unassailable. Not any more. The Read More …
Manga has long since moved away from its homelands in the Far East, and we in the west tend to take for granted now that Manga is part of the international cultural scene. So the news from the Cannes Film Festival that Japan’s Toei Animation studio is working with other countries will come as no surprise. But Read More …
Marvel’s newest superhero movie, Avengers: Endgame, launches across the world in April, and is predicted by some optimists to be the first Hollywood movie to break the half billion dollar mark at the US box office. Given none has yet broken the $400 million mark, that’s wildly ambitious. Observes The Hollywood Reporter, The biggest U.S. Read More …
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 …
“Jessica Jones, Punisher Canceled as Netflix Completes Marvel Purge” runs the headline in The Hollywood Reporter, but it’s not so much a purge as the inevitable consequence of the direction video streaming is taking. And publishing is not so far behind. Original content is of course a great draw for consumers, to a degree. But 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 …
Unusually we Start the Day Global today in Michigan, USA, where this delightful story caught my eye over at Publishers Weekly. Girls of the Crescent: Teen Sisters Promote Stories of Muslim Girls When sisters Mena and Zena Nasiri, both avid teen readers, noticed a dearth of YA books featuring Muslim females like themselves, they took Read More …
The numbers are in and the numbers are: $42 billion globally, with North America contributing an impressive $11.9 billion of that. As reported here at TNPS last month, US takings were on target to beat the 2016 record of $11.4 billion, and final results show a 4% jump on 2016, and 6.7% growth on the Read More …
Diary of a Cricket, as the English translations of De men phieu luu ky runs, is a 1941 children’s book by To Hoai now debuting as a musical thanks to the Ho Chi Minh City Ballet Symphony Orchestra and Opera. Composed by Vu Viet Anh and conducted by Tran Nhat Minh, who together wrote the Read More …
There’s still a week to go – and the busiest week of the year at that – and US Box Office takings are on target for $11.8 billion in 2018, compared to 2016’s previous record of $11.4 billion. And it’s not just revenue. Attendance is up too, by between 5%-7% year on year. So much Read More …
What are the chances? You self-publish a comic book. Someone finds an old copy in a trash can. He happens to be a TV director. Next thing you know, your self-published comic book is a TV series. Now try count the odds for it happening twice! Okay, so there was no trash can involved the Read More …
Debut novelist Sam Marsden is the latest author to grab the attention of the moving pictures folk, with a preemptive TV and film rights deal just before Frankfurt. Stampede, Deadline explains, The book is set in a glass-domed Martian colony and follows 17-year-old Eva Knight, the daughter of colony’s president who detests life on Mars and Read More …
In case you missed any, the past week’s posts from TNPS: As the National Library of Paraguay gets a new Director, Paraguay’s publishing future is digital 2020 World Book Capital’s censorship double standards: It’s one rule for Malay titles and another if the book is in English Mark Williams At Large Amsterdam’s Festival voor het Afrikaans Read More …
