The world’s book market. For real.
One of StreetLib’s accomplishments that I’m most proud of is actually not a StreetLib action per se. As you may know, our CEO and founder, Antonio Tombolini, also has a publishing house — Antonio Tombolini Editore (ATE) — which, 6 months ago, launched The New Publishing Standard (TNPS). It’s our worldwide approach to publishing, applied to journalism.
I actually have a background in journalism, and something that always troubled me about mainstream media is that it gives a very narrow vision of the world. We hear about the Frankfurt Book Fair, London Book Fair and Book Expo America like they are the biggest — if not only — events in the publishing world. In reality, there is a huge range of big events out there, as reported by TNPS.
Mark Williams, TNPS editor-in-chief, expressed exactly my thoughts in the above post:
“Here’s the thing. Most book fairs around the world tend to get a lot less attention from the western publishing media than the big North American and west European events, and that in turn generates the faux narrative that people in some parts of the world simply aren’t interested in books and authors and publishers need not bother about these markets.”
Consequently, even the industry itself disregards these areas and access to books becomes increasingly difficult for those who have as much a desire to read as anyone else, if not more so. One of the reasons we get a distorted view of the world’s publishing market is the lack of data and analysis that would paint an accurate picture of where and how many books are sold and read. But do we really need graphs and charts to tell us that wherever there are people, there are readers?
Since we firmly believe that readers are everywhere and that publishers should have the same publishing opportunities regardless of where they live, we have constantly reached out to people and companies all over the world to build new partnerships and open our services and catalog to new markets.
Another move in realizing this global dream was to make our entire catalog available to the whole world (through StreetLib Stores, and available to read on StreetLib Read). Maybe that sounds like a given to you: “Of course, it’s online, anyone anywhere can access anything online.” Well, think again. On top of potential political restrictions (which we can’t do anything about, unfortunately), online content is ruled by publishers and distributors, as well as market integration.
Even if publishers decide to publish their book ‘worldwide’, online distributors don’t necessarily reach the whole world. Even Amazon’s Kindle Store, which you might consider to be widest distributor in the world, has huge disparities from country to country. As an example, the Kindle store in Gambia shows a mere 7 results (vs. the “over 30K” I see from France and the United States). And that’s from one of the biggest players on the digital publishing scene!
Then, what I call market integration is another, trickier, step. Getting books to every corner of the planet is one thing, but each market has its own specificities. Books aren’t all sold at the same price, and people don’t read on the same devices or have the same access to internet. Adapting to each market is the real way to publish worldwide. Of course, it requires a good knowledge of those markets. Or, at a minimum, awareness of each country’s individual publishing ecosystem.
This is where The New Publishing Standard comes in. Every day, TNPS gives you the chance to discover new aspects of publishing markets all over the world. It’s not a media outlet focused on the third world or niche markets, it simply has a truly worldwide outlook. So go check it out! You’ll see what we mean by international vision.
