One would think a country like Indonesia, not noted for its reading reputation, might soon get tired of a Malaysian company turning up with millions (literally) of English-language books in eleven-day 24/7 flash sales. But if there is a limit, Big Bad Wolf has yet to reach it. Not content with taking 5.5 million books Read More …
We don’t know for sure yet how many trips Big Bad Wolf will be making to Thailand this year, but we do know the dates for the Bangkok bonanza. At a press conference yesterday Big Bad Wolf announced it would be shipping 3 million books – mostly English – to Thailand for an eleven-day 24/7 Read More …
The Chiang Mai Book Fair, as the headline suggests, will be starting June 28 and running through to July 7. Not much information available as to its scale and scope, but I just had to include it here for its adorable artwork. Book fair art often loses sight of its indigenous culture when trying to Read More …
This post is just a reminder to authors and publishers that, unlike in the US and UK where foreign language titles, if available at all, are shunted away in a dark corner, foreign-language books are in demand around the world. We should take care not lose sight of the international marketing opportunities when we distribute Read More …
The International Children’s Content Rights Fair (ICCRF) in Chiang Mai winds up its four-day run today (Sunday December 2). Focussed on children’s content from ASEAN publishers and rights deals between ASEAN countries and the wider world, the ICCRF seeks to open up new opportunities in South East Asia. Regulars here at TNPS will know my views Read More …
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 …
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 …
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 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 …
Ookbee has come – and gone – a long way since its emergence as Thailand’s primary ebook store in 2011. Today Ookbee’s growing empire spreads across five countries in SE Asia, and after a brief but unsuccessful foray into physical goods with a partnership with Japan’s Transcosmos, Ookbee is now comfortably focused doing what it Read More …
The Tet (lunar New Year) holiday has just ended and book fairs set up for the event raked in over a quarter million dollars in book sales in the week long event. Fully half of that came from the Ho Chi Minh City event, held across three streets in District 1 – Nguyen Hue, Mac Read More …
