The numbers on the paper market’s dashboard are, by the standards of the past five years, almost serene. Pulp prices have retreated from their peaks. Freight rates have normalised. Energy, that brutal swing factor of the early…
The most interesting material in book manufacturing this year is grown, not made. Mycelium packaging — the engineered root structure of fungi, cultivated into moulds and dried into rigid, lightweight, fully compostable forms — has crossed from…
A technical document few readers will ever see is generating an unusual volume of argument across the book trade. The draft specification for EPUB4 — the first major revision of the publishing industry’s standard ebook format in…
The publishing industry’s quietest bottleneck has no elegant solution. In the romance category — the trade’s most reliably commercial fiction engine, powered by voracious readerships across a dozen languages — the demand for translation has outstripped the…
Six years ago, the Sharjah International Book Fair’s rights programme was a well-regarded regional appointment: the place where Arabic-language publishing met its neighbours, and where a modest but growing number of translation deals moved between the Gulf,…
The ghost has left the attic. Ghostwriting — the professional craft of writing books that carry someone else’s name — has spent centuries in publishing’s polite shadows, acknowledged in whispers and credited in fine print. This year…
A decade ago, “selling direct” in publishing meant a website with a shopping cart, a warehouseful of ambition, and revenue that rounded to zero. The direct-to-consumer channel was a vanity — a way to capture the true…
In an industry where the word “revolution” is spent freely on matters of marketing, the offset printing press is having a genuine one — quietly, incrementally, and from an unexpected direction. Waterless offset, a technology that eliminates…
The book trade’s on-demand printing revolution has always had an awkward final step. For twenty years, digital printing allowed a publisher to manufacture single copies economically; what it did not allow was for that capability to live…
For most of the past two decades, Turkish fiction occupied a curious position in the international rights market: critically respected, prize-adjacent, and persistently under-translated relative to the scale of the country’s literary output. That position is shifting,…
