As the Market Focus country at the 2019 London Book Fair, Indonesia’s National Book Committee was hoping to secure 50 title sales to add to the 1,200 it has collected since its establishment in 2015. As the fair drew to a close 23 sales had already been signed on the spot, and with 12 countries Read More …
We’re weeks away from the Emirate of Sharjah, part of the United Arab Emirates, assuming the title of UNESCO Word Book Capital, and it’s likely there’s never been a more fitting choice. Not because this is the first Arab nation – in fact Egypt and Lebanon have both carried the title in past years. Nor Read More …
Most people reading this will know of the TV series Dragon’s Den, or Shark Tank, or any of thirty localised variations of the show where entrepreneurs pitch their business ideas to risk-averse investors. Originating in Japan as Money Tigers, Dragons Den has been reproduced around the globe from Afghanistan to Vietnam, and occasionally publishing opportunities Read More …
Audible, like CreateSpace, began life independently of Amazon, and by the time Amazon acquired them both, these two savvy publishing ventures had carved niches that, for the longest while, Amazon was happy to leave alone. Everyone was happy. But Audible, an ambitious, globally-minded operation, soon found that its international aspirations were beholden to Amazon’s roadmap. Read More …
Unsurprisingly, audiobooks have been a hot topic at the London Book Fair, which finishes today, but it wasn’t the usual suspects, Audible and Storytel, that grabbed the headlines. The Bookseller’s Audiobook producer of the Year Award went to an audio outfit in the United Arab Emirates, which may come as a surprise to those who Read More …
If last year’s inaugural IPA Africa Seminar in Lagos was a much needed wake-up call to a global publishing industry that had largely ignored the world’s second largest continent, the 2nd incarnation in Nairobi in June will elevate the debate to the next level. From the IPA press release: Leading figures in African writing and Read More …
Italy-based digital books distributor and publishing facilitator StreetLib has completed the third stage of its global roll-out, and now offers an author and publisher portal for every nation in Africa. The New Publishing Standard (TNPS) is published by StreetLib to further the debate about the global book markets. TNPS is not a StreetLib promotion tool. Read More …
The 40th Feria Internacional del Libro del Palacio de Minería wound up earlier this week, and provides another example of the myriad book fairs around the world that attract booklovers that spend money on books outside the traditional bookselling infrastructure of book stores and online stores. Book sales that therefore rarely get noticed by the Read More …
When Oman’s Muscat International Book Fair scraped across the magical one million visitors mark in 2018, by just 60, clocking an elegant attendance of 1,000,060, the big question was, could it be repeated? Oman, after all, is an Arab nation in the Middle East. Hardly a hot bed of publishing and reading. Or so we’re Read More …
The French ebook and audio store Numilog has been focused primarily, although not exclusively, on academic and reference books, which can be expensive to buy and often are not read end to end. That can be a deterrent to buying, unless you really need to, and so Numilog has rolled out a new consumption model Read More …
This is a translation of an original article by Daniel Kotliński, which can be found here. An entertainment platform, not a bookstore with a subscription option. Prospects and plans for the development of the Storytel brand. Like storytelling itself, audio has limitless possibilities. Does an application for audio materials that has been out on the Polish market Read More …
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 …
In what is believed to be a first, a Kurdish woman will be publishing a novel written in English. Reports Publishers Weekly in its Global Deals email: In a three-way auction, Chelsea Hutchens won world rights (excluding Canada) to Warrior Butterflies, the debut novel by Ava Homa, which both the author and her agent, Chris 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 …
Self-publishing is alive and well across Latin America, and nowhere more so than in Colombia, where the Bogota International Book Fair (FILBo from its Spanish title Feria del Libro Bogotá) is for the second year running giving self-publishers a chance to, participate in the Book Forums and other professionalization spaces promoted and organized by FILBo. 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 …
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 …
A common theme here at TNPS is the much-overlooked demand for English-language content in parts of the world where English is not the first or official language. Perhaps nowhere has that been more apparent than with the Big Bad Wolf phenomenon, where a Malaysia-based outfit ships literally millions of English-language books to countries like Indonesia, Read More …
Just weeks before Avengers: Endgame hits the big screen, and with the Oscars success of Black Panther and Into the Spider-Verse fresh in the public mind, Rakuten’s digital library distributor OverDrive has added Marvel Comics to its Marketplace, meaning any of the available titles can be made available to any partner library and can be read on the Libby app. Read More …
We won’t know the full story for Storytel 2018 until April, but the Q4 results are out and include an overview of the year, and a clear picture is emerging of consistent and sustainable growth, driven by digital. As I’ll explore in a follow-up report on the Swedish book market, what we are seeing in Read More …
