Storytel’s twelfth audiobook and ebook store went live this past week (confession – I got distracted by the IPA Regional Seminar, so a few days late with the news), with Turkey the third of five planned launches this year.
Turkey joined Iceland and the United Arab Emirates as 2018 additions to a fold that already included Denmark, Finland, Norway, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Spain and India, as well as Sweden.
The Storytel Turkey store fields just 300 Turkish audiobooks at this point, with a full array of English-language titles, but we can expect Storytel to be adding content frequently.
Storytel acquired the Turkish audiobook operator Seslenen Kitap, then Turkey’s biggest audiobook producer, in October 2017.
At the same time it acquired audiobook operations in Iceland and Bulgaria.
With the Iceland and Turkey acquisitions both now live under the Storytel banner it leaves just Bulgaria from the October deals to come to fruition. Storytel keeps its cards close to its chest, but with the acquisition of the Bulgarian company D&D Factory that provides the Bulgarian audiobooks service Audioknigi, numerous Scandinavian literary agencies reporting Bulgarian language rights deals to Storytel, and the fact that Storytel is already fielding Bulgarian-language audiobooks on its services, it’s now a matter of guessing whether Bulgaria or Italy will be next to go live.
Italy preparations do seem the most advanced, but that may be just a reflection of my inability to navigate the internet efficiently in the Cyrillic alphabet that Bulgaria prefers.
