Publishing: Around The World

The Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival 

The 13th Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival, 2022, is all set to open its gate after the pandemic. This year it is running from May 11-22, takes as its theme “Create Creativity”, and one of the centerpieces for the 2022 event will be the Robot Zoo Exhibition, with eight animal robots and fifteen hands-on activities exploring nature and science. The Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival is one of the biggest children’s literary events in the world, in 2018 just missed 250,000 visitors and hit 300,000 in 2019, before the Pandemic arrived to dampen the Arab Renaissance. The children’s festival managed a subdued version in 2021 after being shelved in 2020.

The Sharjah Book Authority’s new Booksellers Conference at Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival 

Recently, Sharjah Book Authority‘s chairman Ahmed Al Ameri has announced a new event for May 15 and 16: The Sharjah Booksellers Conference, which is set for May 15 and 16 at Sharjah Publishing City. Before the new Booksellers Conference is seated, the annual Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival will have opened, running May 11 to 22. The booksellers’ gathering is an event paralleling the reading festival, a bit like the autumn’s Publishers Conference precedes Sharjah International Book Fair and its annual librarians’ conference is held during the run of the show.

Abu Dhabi International Book Fair 2022

Abu Dhabi International Book Fair going to be held in Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre (ADNEC) Abu Dhabi from 23rd  to 29th  May 2022. This year’s edition of ADIBF aims to highlight the UAE’s rich heritage, showcasing its authenticity and modernity, as well as its cultural and literary output. Abu Dhabi is a driving force behind the professional and commercial development of the regional publishing industry and is committed to the long-term expansion of the global book business. Over the years, ADIBF has gained a global reputation as a leading literary trade and cultural event in the region.

Manga sees explosive growth in North America

One of the big publishing success stories—and perhaps one of the industry’s biggest surprises—of the past two years is how well manga is selling in North America. Words like “explosive growth” and “unprecedented” are now commonly used to describe the manga marketplace. Driven by such strong tailwinds, manga publishers are looking to a possible post-pandemic consumer market with more readers hungry for even more titles, more channels for print and digital distribution, and still more types of stories, not just from Japan but South Korea and China as well—indeed, more of everything that has made manga such a popular category of late.

Professor Mark D. Cole delivers The 2022 Charles Clark Memorial Lecture

The 2022 Charles Clark Memorial Lecture was the closing event at this year’s altered but well-attended London Book Fair at Olympia London. The annual Memorial Lecture, and Book Fair highlights, celebrate, and remember the achievements of Charles Clark who was a publisher, lawyer, and eminent authority on copyright law.

This year’s lecture was given by Professor Mark D. Cole, Professor of Media and Telecommunication Law at the University of Luxembourg, who took his audience through an interesting overview of the EU’s experience of regulating online platforms and what future legislation may look like. Although a complex and dense topic, Professor Cole gave an accessible and engaging lecture in which he explained how regulation has evolved from the EU’s e-Commerce Directive and Information Society Directive to the recent Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act.

India – Guest of Honour at the Paris Book Festival 2022

India has been designated as the Guest of Honour Country at the Paris Book Festival 2022, which took place from April 21 to April 24, 2022. On April 21, 2022, the Paris Book Festival was launched, and on the same day, the India Pavilion at the Paris Book Festival was also inaugurated. The National Institute of Design (NID) developed the India Pavilion, which comprises over 15 digital and physical exhibitions showing over 400 books published in various Indian languages, representing the work of 65 Indian publishers.

The Google Play Books AI-narration option 

Google Play Books has announced a new awesome book feature in their Partner Center: Auto-generated Audiobooks. It helps to convert Google Play e-books into Google Voice-generated audiobooks for free. The new feature offers 35+ narrative voices in English and Spanish. With this new option, publishers of all sizes have the chance to upload an e-book or epub file and use what, for now, are free tools to tweak an automated narration before publishing on Google Play and, all importantly, exporting the finished file to be sold elsewhere.

TikTok crazes fuel book purchases

UK publishing’s total income reached a new high of £6.7bn in 2021, up 5% from 2020. This growth comes despite – or perhaps because of – the pandemic, with the social media platform TikTok emerging as a surprise driving force not only for new books, but backlist purchases. While the Covid lockdowns forced bookshops to close and subsequent supply chain issues caused delays and headaches for publishers, the appetite for reading soared, with sales up by 5% year on year for both print and digital books, while audiobooks continued the “stellar” performance of recent years with a 14% rise in sales, according to a report from the Publishers Association.

The New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers Announces 2022 – 2023 Fellows

The New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers has selected its 24th class of Fellows: 15 talented academics, independent scholars, and creative writers. Selected from a pool of 356 applicants from 37 countries, the class of 2022 includes: Academics: Daphne A. Brooks, Margaret Kelleher, Neil Maher, Sarah Maza, Maurice Samuels, and Erin L. Thompson; Nonfiction writers: Rozina Ali, Raghu Karnad, Patrick Phillips, and Francesca Wade; Fiction writers: Claire Luchette, Daniel Saldaña París, Brandon Taylor, and C Pam Zhang; and Poet:  Colin Channer.

Women’s Prize Shortlist 2022

The 27th annual Women’s Prize shortlist has books that range in theme from ghosts to personal freedom to the power of nature and were written by authors representing the USA, New Zealand, Canada, Trinidad, Turkey, and the UK. The prize was started in 1996 in response to the 1991 Booker Prize Shortlist not having any women. The shortlisted books are: Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason;  Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead; The Sentence by Louise Erdrich; The Bread the Devil Knead by Lisa Allen-Agostini; The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki; and The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak.