It all seemed so implausible at the start of this decade. Ebooks had officially arrived, thanks to Amazon’s Kindle store breathing life into a format that had been around since long before. But it was just a digital extension of the status quo retail model. It was printed books on a screen, not remotely exploring digital’s Read More …
Swedish streaming service Bookbeat may have put the UK on hold, but it’s still battling for market share in Finland, Germany and homeland Sweden, with Finland performing well. In an interview with Sweden’s Boktugg, Bookbeat CEO Niclas Sandin intimated he expected more growth from Germany in 2019 and that together Germany and Finland might exceed Read More …
German ebook distributor Bookwire has for over a year now been offering POD distribution in Spanish Latin America via PodiPrint, and has now taken the step of introducing the service at home in Europe. Bookwire has contracted with Amazon’s Kindle Enterprise Publishing to offer Bookwire titles as paperbacks in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The deal Read More …
Frankfurt is well-known as the world’s biggest trade fair for books, and rightly grabs all the media attention during its short course, but meanwhile the rest of the world carries on with its own literary frenzy of book fairs and festivals, all year around, often unnoticed and unremarked. Come the new year I’m going to Read More …
As I write this, HarperCollins’ CEO Charlie Redmayne is due to make a keynote speech at Frankfurt on the subscription model. Too soon to report on that, but in a preview interview over at Publishing Perspectives earlier this month Redmayne said, Ultimately, if subscription is a business model that consumers buy into, then it’s incumbent Read More …
This is Storytel’s global reach as we start October 2018: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Spain, India, United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Italy, with imminent launches in Bulgaria and Mexico, and a Brazil launch unconfirmed but looking likely. With the exception of Italy, none are countries where Amazon’s Audible is an active Read More …
While US and UK publishers watch the Scandinavian experiment from a safe distance, a mixture of envy and fear in their eyes, Sweden’s BookBeat goes from strength to strength, leaving no doubt that, whatever publishers may feel about the subscription model, consumers love it. Bookbeat’s June, July and August revenue grew 97% compared to 2017, Read More …
Here’s a summary of TNPS posts from the past seven days. Big Bad Wolf shows the world’s demand for English-language titles, taking 2 million books to Taiwan this week Brazil’s São Paulo Biennial disappointed with fewer visitors (“only” 663,000) but they spent 33% more Amazon to open a Customer Service Centre in Colombia in October, Read More …
Revenues up 11.3%, sales up 16.4% and buyers increased by 6.1%, according to the latest survey report from Börsenverein. The survey, which excludes textbooks and specialist books, suggests an extra 2.7 million people bought ebooks in the first six months of 2018 compared to the same period last year. On average German readers are now Read More …
Little known in the Anglophone publishing world, the Munich-based ebook subscription service Skoobe is about to see a change of management, if not direction. CEO Constance Landsberg voluntarily leaves Skoobe in September to pursue new possibilities, leaving Julian Manzel to take the reigns. Said Manzel, who first joined Skoobe way back in 2011, I’m really looking Read More …
A month ahead of schedule, Bookbeat, the audiobook and ebook subscription arm of the Swedish publishing giant Bonnier, has reached its milestone of 100,000 subscribers, reports Boktugg’s Sölve Dahlgren., who says the company is on target to to reach SEK 150 million ($17 million) in revenue for the full year 2018. Bookbeat CEO Niclas Sandin 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. Follow TNPS on twitter here: @thenewpubstd. But twitter is an ephemeral beast. Blink and you miss it. 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 …
The Arabic Childrenʹs Literature Festival was held last month in Munich, reports Qantara, where at the city’s Gasteig cultural centre the International Youth Library presented a catalogue of Arabic-language children’s books for German readers. Qantara, noting that, Arabic childrenʹs books have been all but invisible in Germany (with) almost no translations into German and very 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 …
Hard on the heels of Storytel’s Q1 results comes news that rival operator Bookbeat saw a 130% revenue growth in Q1 2017. This after a 280% increase in revenue in 2017. Bookbeat, the digital arm of Sweden’s Bonnier, still draws most of its revenue from Sweden, but reported profitability in both Sweden and Finland. Said Read More …
With a population of 46 million Spain is fielding 4,600 public libraries – one for every 10,000 citizens, and 8.6 million adults have visited said libraries in 2017 – almost 19% of the population. But while 60 million print books were borrowed from Spanish libraries in 2017, just 126,000 ebooks were downloaded. That’s according to 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 …
The latest report from the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, which publishes quarterly reports in cooperation with GfK Entertainment, sends out mixed messages about the state of the German ebook market. On the one hand, unit sales were up one million to 29.1 million, and purchase intensity (how many ebooks were bought per active consumer) was Read More …
Akademibokhandel’s subsidiary Bokus will start audiobook streaming in Sweden this spring, going head to head with Storytel, Bookbeat and Nextory. Boktugg reports this week that Bonnier-owned Bookbeat saw revenue rise 283% last year and that it is is hoping to hit SEK 100 million ($12 million) soon, as it adds Spain and Italy to its Read More …
