Peter Schoppert's Blog

NUS Press is pleased to say that we have two books in the shortlist for the ICAS 2015 Book Prize. You have a chance to buy them here!

“We still call it a ‘book’ fair…”, said the representative of the Frankfurt Book Fair to a recent meeting of publishers in the region. Digital technology and pervasive data networks are changing the structure and possibly even the nature of the book publishing industry, in Singapore as in the rest of the world. But this is by no means something happening “to” publishers: Singapore’s entrepreneurial publishers are shaping the digital transition as much or even more than they are sh...

Singapore’s publishers have been operating digital businesses for decades. Professional, academic and science, technology and medicine (STM) publishers were the first to take the plunge into digital, and have been providing book and journal content electronically to libraries and institutions around the world for at least the last 15 years. For all intents and purposes, the academic journal market is now an electronic one, with print copies a minor supplement to digital distribution. Educatio...

Singapore’s publishing industry benefitted from the wave of digital technologies that started to become important in publishing in the 1980s, including desktop publishing, database publishing, digital scanning and colour separation, and computer-to-plate printing. Singapore suppliers leveraged the new technologies to great comparative price advantage, and some Singapore publishers worked closely with them to establish global franchises. The picture is more complicated today, in part because t...

Japanese publishers may not be too familiar to English-speaking readers (except for manga fans of course!), but Japanese bookseller Kinokuniya has done a very good job of entering new English-language markets with its multilingual bookshops over the last 20+ years. The importance and relevance of this effort to the Japanese publishing industry was brought home to me in the attendance at the party for Kinokuniya's 30th anniversary in Singapore hosted by Masashi Takai, President of Kinokun...

«In the kingdom of MySpace, the eHarmony Band used to think themselves more than a match for the E-Street Band with their new folksonomy and flash algorithms, but their Rick Roll Skyrock was so raucous the soundpedia citizendium of Wikicity spread the Google buzz that soon roused the princes of the realm, Habbo, Bebo, senile Weibo and the twins Badoo and Bahu, to decide there and then that the lead Orkut Xing who fancied himself a latter day Bing Dogsby (not Crosby; nor Stills or Nash) was a...

How big is Singapore's book market? What are the trends driving developments? One of hte most interesting projects I took on over the last six months was writing a report that analyzes the trade, educational and professional markets to better understand the future of books and publishing in Singapore.

The result is this report for the The Publishers Association (PA), who produce a series of such reports on different countries around the world. The PA is the leading trade organisation serv...

Was accredited to the Cannes Film Festival this year - my first time. I didn't really have much work to do, it was a courtesy accreditation from Martin Scorcese's World Cinema Foundation.

Cannes combines three events in one. The biggest event is 1) the film market, which brings together buyers and sellers of films (and services like film finance and location support). This is the part most directly comparable across media to the Frankfurt Bookfair. The market attendees don't really have...

One of my most interesting PS Media projects is writing a report for the UK Publishers Association on Singapore's book markets and publishing industry. The report will be available via the Publishers Association soon (very soon!). Here is my current draft of one section, on regulation of the industry, and I am posting it here to invite comments and input from the public and industry players. Please leave your thoughts here, or email me directly. Your help is most appreciated!

As in other count...