The 23rd Thailand National Book Expo, in parallel with the Thailand Children’s Book Festival, is underway in Bangkok. The event began yesterday, Oct 17 and runs twelve days until Oct 28. Visitor numbers are expected to run into the “hundreds of thousands.” I’ll try get clarification of whether that means “just” 200k or up to Read More …
Back in December 2017 TNPS ran with the headline, S.E. Asia online economy growing faster than predicted. $200bn by 2025. Will publishers rise to the opportunity? S.E. Asia online economy growing faster than predicted. $200bn by 2025. Will publishers rise to the opportunity? It seems some have. This week comes news that, from a base Read More …
Here’s a summary of TNPS posts from the past seven days. Book reading down slightly in New Zealand. More than half read NZ authors Storytel Brazil 2019 launch whispers grows louder Spanish book market valued at minimum $2.7 billion. Paperback and ebook sales both rising Côte d’Ivoire: francophone Africa publishing insights Is Amazon preparing a Read More …
Not content with its Latin America ambitions, with a Mexico launch set for December, and a Brazil launch looking likely in the New Year, Storytel has announced the next stage of its Asia expansion is underway. To start with it’s an office in Bangkok, which will be used to coordinate expansion across the continent as Read More …
Big Bad Wolf makes its debut in Taiwan in a few days time, and it’s taking 2 million new English-language books to kick off the event at the New Taipei Exhibition Hall, starting August 17. The Taiwan Big Bad Wolf sales runs through to August 27, so the usual eleven day event, and of course Read More …
Big Bad Wolf Bangkok opened yesterday (Aug 10) and this time it’s three million English-language books laid out at one venue for eleven days of literally non-stop (24/7) book-buying, in a country notable for being somewhere “nobody reads.” This image is from Bangkok 2018 and typifies the Big Bad Wolf scene. New books, stacked high, Read More …
In a modern world where, supposedly, no-one reads books anymore because we are all bingeing on Netflix, perhaps we should not be so surprised that the BBC, once the bastion of fact-checked reporting and reliable perspectives, doesn’t take as much notice of the global publishing industry as it might. But it is still disappointing that 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 …
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 Read More …
The Philippines has long been one of Wattpad’s strongholds, but this month comes news from Manila Bulletin that fully 7 million of Wattpad’s 65+ million users around the world are from that one country. After the latest $51 million round of Wattpad funding in January, with a substantial portion coming from China’s Tencent – Tencent Read More …
