Scholastic has boosted Rakuten OverDrive’s schools ebook catalogue with Dav Pilkey’s Dog Man and a host of other bestselling titles including perennial classics like RL Stine’s Goosebumps, and series like The Baby-Sitters Club Very little detail on the OverDrive blog to add to this story right now, just some genre summaries and a handful of Read More …
Originating from Hungary, now based in the US, PublishDrive is the youngest of the new breed of aggregators born of the digital self-publishing revolution, offering a pay-as-you-sell service for authors and small presses. That is, until this week. Now PublishDrive has distanced itself from its competitors with a new four-tier finance model for authors and Read More …
Variety this week carries the news that Amazon’s Audible is hiring top Hollywood names to narrate its original audiobooks. Which is fair enough given this is a Hollywood story. What’s a little surprising is the coverage the story is getting in the publishing industry media. Celebrities narrating audiobooks is nothing new, but it seems anything Read More …
Marvel has confirmed a Muslim superhero named Ms Marvel – Pakistani-American teenager Kamala Khan – will star in a live-action series on Disney+. Very few details available right now, and one can only wonder if this is more about political correctness and the need to appear “inclusive”, rather than a genuine realisation the world needs Read More …
The Library of Congress National Book Festival 2019 has been revealed, and it’s a stunning feast of geometry around an open book. Marian Bantjes is a designer, illustrator, typographer and writer and this poster for the one-day festival on August 31 shows all those skills in action. The Library of Congress blog quotes Bantjes as saying, Read More …
Thanks to a deal between Apple and Rakuten-OverDrive, the digital library app Libby is now compatible with Apple’s CarPlay in-car entertainment system. According to OverDrive the Libby app is now available from 90% of North American public libraries, and drivers with a library card and the CarPlay system can, select and navigate audiobooks with large, Read More …
As one of the world’s largest education publishing companies, the news that Pearson is to phase out printed textbooks in its core US market is a serious blow to the “screen fatigue” brigade’s efforts to downplay the rise and rise of digital. In a press release today Pearson has announced it is, breaking from the Read More …
Leaving aside any debate about the rights and wrongs of the US-China trade dispute and tariffs being imposed by both sides, the dispute has brought to the fore the unhealthy reliance of US publishers on China – or more specifically of US publishers that have their books printed in China. An estimated 150 million Bibles Read More …
It will have surprised few that, for the second year running, the StatShot Annual Report of the Association of American Publishers has reported online retail exceeded bricks & mortar stores in delivering revenue to member publishers. And taking a step back, if we allow that most AAP member publishers have a lot of investment in Read More …
At the American Library Association Annual Meeting this month digital library content facilitator Rakuten OverDrive revealed a statistic that bears out a simple truth in any format: More choice of books means more reader engagement. The numbers are startling. Ebook and audiobook reading increased over 240% when students connected their Sora classroom reading app to their local Read More …
You might be forgiven for thinking Barnes & Noble was such a train wreck that you couldn’t pay someone to take it off Len Riggio’s hands, such has been the tone of some industry commentators. So the news today that hedge fund Elliott Management has (subject to regulatory approval) acquired America’s biggest bookstore chain will Read More …
It’s anyone’s guess what the value of the global comics market is, but for North America the best valuation we have for 2018 is $1.095 billion, of which at least $100 million came in from digital. That’s according to ICv2, which reports the Kindle store leading sales for manga, and the second largest venue for Read More …
For a while it seemed like smartspeakers were the new black of digital audio, driving sales ever higher. But a new study by Score Publishing suggests all is not well in the smartspeaker market, with book-related search queries at best delivering accurate results only 72.5% of the time, and the one we’d expect to do Read More …
2019 is definitely shaping up to be the year digital subscription comes of age. Hard on the heels of Scribd announcing its one millionth subscriber – Scribd defies its critics. Hits 1 million subscribers , and with Storytel on target to clear a million subscribers by end 2019 – Storytel Q4 report: Subscribers up 44% Read More …
Emails are going out this week telling Books-A-Million’s BAM Publish users that BAM is out of the publishing services business as of March 1. BAM Publish clients will be shifted to FastPencil, an operator that offers services similar to those being discontinued by BAM. Or rather, identical, as BAM partnered with FastPencil in 2016. Which 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 …
“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 …
Regulars here at TNPS will not have been surprised that Rakuten OverDrive last year surpassed the quarter billion download mark, serving 274 million digital books to eager consumers through its global library distribution service. While the USA is by far the bigger client country of OverDrive we should remember that the company delivers digital books Read More …
NPD Bookscan has reported 2018 print sales at 707.4 million, the highest since 2010. Michelle Obama’s Becoming played a big role in that, and of course in previous years it’s been JK Rowling. Nice to know, in this era of diversity in publishing, that women authors are keeping the industry afloat. Over at Publishers Lunch 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 …
