For those who didn’t get the chance to open any or all the regular email notifications from TNPS, a summary of the key stories covered in the past two weeks as western publishing took its annual break.
We need to head back to December 21 to start the catching up, with this post about the Nigerian aggregator Publiseer which announced a new initiative to address the gender imbalance in African publishing.
The year began with Scribd announcing it had one million subscribers, and ended with Scribd announcing it has $100 million in revenue coming in from its streaming service.
In Saudi Arabia and average of 44,000 a day were attending the Jeddah International Book Fair.
Amazon announced its Amazon Ads pay-to-play book promotion service was now an option in France, Italy and Spain, as well as Germany, UK and US.
Saudi Arabia’s Riyadh International Book Fair revealed its new logo.
TNPS doesn’t stop for Christmas and nor does the global book market. On December 25th we reported on the Islamabad Museum Book Fair in Pakistan.
And also on Christmas Day we were the first to announce the sale of OverDrive to private equity firm KKR. The official press release was put out at 6.30pm on Christmas Eve…
Also at Christmas it was announced Amazon’s KDP has now overseen the publication of more than 2 million titles.
Denmark’s digital library system came under the spotlight.
We took an advance look at India’s huge Chennai Book Fair.
And for good measure we took a look at the Doha International Book fair in Qatar.
As the year ended we learned that the dispute between Audible and the big publishers over captions might be nearing closure.
Returning to Pakistan we took a look at the country’s first street library.
And while publisher employees prepared to say goodbye to an old year and an old decade, TNPS was bringing you news that a new audiobook subscription service was being readied in South Korea.
We wound up 2019 with our Story of the Year. There were three candidates, but Storytel took the prize.
2020 got off to a positive start with a report that UK print had its best year since 2010.
TNPS just wouldn’t be TNPS without a look at Turkey’s vibrant book fair scene.
And then we moved to the Middle East where news from the video streaming sector was addressed in the context of digital books opportunities.
January 2 also saw an overview of the global book fair scene as millions descend on literary fairs and festivals around the world.
In Nigeria anew award called SWAP emerged from an organisation called SpriNG. It all makes sense in the OP.
And we stayed with an awards theme by heading off to Palestine.
The Harry Potter franchise continues to rake in the cash. $41 million from Pottermore, with global digital books in the driving seat.
In Bangladesh the annual National Textbook Festival dished out over a third of a billion books to its primary and secondary school children, showing the world how publishing and education can together build a brighter future.
January 4 saw the kick-off of the New Delhi World Book Fair in India.
And finally, we took a look at Big Bad Wolf as it prepared for its second year in the Mynmar capital Yangon.
