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 …
There’s still a week to go – and the busiest week of the year at that – and US Box Office takings are on target for $11.8 billion in 2018, compared to 2016’s previous record of $11.4 billion. And it’s not just revenue. Attendance is up too, by between 5%-7% year on year. So much Read More …
The past seven days on TNPS – here’s what you missed. Dubai Audio Library “the largest Arabic audio library in the world” Dubai Audio Library “the largest Arabic audio library in the world” Self-published comic book to become Netflix series – Again Self-published comic book to become Netflix series – Again Saudi Arabia’s 4th Read More …
What a turnaround from those heady days of 2010-12 when many believed publishing was doomed, amid very real crises in the book retail and publishing sectors. A time when many predicted (some joyfully) the death of print and that the then Big 6 would follow Borders into oblivion as ebooks became the only format consumers Read More …
The Hot Sheet is a publishing industry news-sheet for authors, produced every two weeks by Porter Anderson and Jane Friedman, and reviewed here every other Sunday (when possible) as one of the best bi-weekly industry overviews available to authors. We’re not interested in delivering breaking news, but perspective on stories that are likely to retain meaning for your Read More …
Amazon’s own books are quietly taking over the site – or so runs a headline in Quartz, which tells us, Last year Amazon Publishing put out 1,552 books across its 15 imprints. It’s a telling point that Amazon’s imprints rarely make an impact in the print charts – even on Amazon – but do disproportionately Read More …
When Digital Book World announced Data Guy would be delivering the closing keynote speech, during which time he would dazzle us with yet more publishing industry numbers known to nobody else, and incidentally would reveal his true identity and answer his critics, there was a muted response. Data Guy’s true identity is neither here nor Read More …
The Hot Sheet is a publishing industry news-sheet for authors, produced every two weeks by Porter Anderson and Jane Friedman, and reviewed here every other Sunday (when possible) as one of the best bi-weekly industry overviews available to authors. We’re not interested in delivering breaking news, but perspective on stories that are likely to retain meaning for your Read More …
South Africa, Canada , the USA, the UK and Nigeria are on the travel map today as we start the day global today in what you may or may not consider the USA: Puerto Rico. If we outside the US and Caribbean think of Puerto Rico at all it is probably in relation to the Read More …
We start the day global today in the USA, where Ron Charles in the Washington Post asked, Do we still need Banned Books Week? Charles, according to Joni Di Placido, writing for the Kobo Writing Life blog, argued that book banning is largely confined to our repressive past. Charles here presumably (the OP is behind Read More …
The UK’s Bradford Literature Festival launched in 2014 with a two-day event that attracted 968 people. As we all know, no-one reads books anymore because they are all too busy bingeing on Netflix or wasting their time on social media or (insert latest fashionable nonsense). So one can only guess at why the Bradford Literature Read More …
Here’s a summary of TNPS posts from the past seven days. UK small publishers find new ways to survive as chain bookstores turn them away HarperCollins’ Harlequin launches romance book website in Australia The Mogadishu Book Fair: an oasis of tranquility in a troubled land Small presses and self-publishers left stranded by collapse of Read More …
It may not be the biggest, despite what Statista tells you, but the San Diego comic convention was the first to sue for the right to the branding “Comic Con,” and news just emerging is that the Salt Lake Comic Con, has been landed a $4 million bill as part of a legal decision that Read More …
