and more.
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WH Smith Revises Down Profit Forecast
Share prices have plunged at the U.K.-based WH Smith, which sold its bookstore chain earlier this year, after the company sliced £30 million off its £140 million profit forecast due to problems in its U.S. operations, now being investigated by Deloitte.
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Audible Sets Its Sights on Mexico, Spanish-Language Expansion
At an event in Mexico City earlier this month, the audiobook platform showcased its growing Spanish-language catalog, with an emphasis on original productions in collaboration with local authors and narrators.
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Wilton Square Launches with Plans to Acquire Orphaned Unbound Titles
Will Atkinson, former head of Atlantic Books in the U.K., has founded Wilton Square Press, a new publisher that intends to acquire titles from the now-defunct Unbound and Boundless, offering authors a joint-venture, revenue-share contract.
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U.K.’s StoryFeast Festival Spotlights East and Southeast Asian Voices
The inaugural StoryFeast Festival in London, which runs September 13–21 and features 20 authors, aims to raise the profile of East and Southeast Asian writers for U.K. readers and publishers alike.
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BookTok Celeb Jack Edwards Wants to Elevate Online Reading Culture
Edwards’s new online book club, Inklings, attracted 75,000 members in its first week. The U.K.-based influencer, who hosts livestreams for the Booker Prize and is curating a day of events at the Gothenburg Book Fair, says he wants to make literary discussions more accessible.
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Storytel Surpasses 2.5 Million Subscribers
Net sales at Storytel rose to $87.4 million in Q2 thanks in part to what CEO Bodil Eriksson Torp called “high subscriber intake.” The Swedish audiobook and e-book streaming company added 80,000 new subscribers in Nordic countries and 35,000 abroad.
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Canadian Author Sues Four AI Companies for Copyright Infringement
J.B. MacKinnon of Vancouver has filed class action lawsuits against Anthropic, Databricks, Meta, and Nvidia, alleging they illegally used copyrighted works by Canadian writers to train their large language models.
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Ingram’s MediaScout Launches in U.K. and European Markets
Ingram Content Group has expanded MediaScout, its film and television rights discovery service, to the U.K. and Europe. The platform allows media professionals to search across a database of 2.4 million book titles for rights information.
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Young Readers Help German Book Market Hold Steady
The German book industry reported a 1.8% increase in revenue for 2024, reaching €9.88 billion; adjusted for inflation, the market fell by 0.4%. Younger book buyers bolstered the market, with the number of buyers ages 16 to 19 increasing by 9.6%.
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Audiobook Pros Confirm the Customer is Always Right
At this year’s Parix Audio Day conference in Madrid, audiobook execs framed the future as one of opportunity, especially when it comes to AI and listener engagement, but stressed that publishers must be sensitive to consumer preferences.
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