For those who don’t get the chance to open all the regular email notifications from TNPS, a summary of the key stories covered in the past seven days.
Our week began with news from India where the Vijayawada Book Fair was seeing English-language books outselling the local language Telegu. At TNPS we’ve long argued digital can help support indigenous languages, and at Vijawwada this year the idea is catching on.
The biggest story of the year so far came while I was struggling with internet connectivity, so just a summary here of what Storytel has planned through ’til 2023.
From the USA came news that the dispute between publishers and Amazon-owned Audible seems close to settlement.
OverDrive reported that through 2019 its Sora app had seen student reading time double.
Then came news from the publisher of The Witcher books that the Netflix adaptation had forced them to print an extra half million copies.
And the Netherlands has a new digital library supplier – Spain’s ODILO.
In Belarus a new women-only publishing house has been set up.
In China, numbers continue to be contradictory. One report claims China as over 70,000 bookstores.
Big Bad Wolf has two events running simultaneously, in Myanmar and Cambodia. I took the Cambodia event as a hook to examine publisher opportunities globally, both for print and digital.
Returning to India, we learned that the New Delhi World Book Fair attracted over one million visitors this year.
And our final story of the week is a mixture of fact and speculation. The facts are that Penguin Random House has removed its titles from unlimited streaming services like Storytel, Bookbeat and Nextory. The speculation is that PRH may be planning to launch its own streaming service.
