…or four really, since it is also a story of Singapore publishing… this based on a short speech I made at the launch of Marjorie Doggett’s Singapore: a Photographic Record, published by the Photographic Heritage Foundation, Hong Kong, with NUS Press, and supported by the Ng Teng Fong Charitable Foundation.

Singapore has just announced its national AI strategy, comprising a series of ecosystem-strengthening moves, and major national projects in five key areas, one of which is right in the book publishing wheelhouse: education.

!!! NB: This report was originally piublished for the UK PA in 2012 INTRODUCTION “We still call it a ‘book’ fair…”, said the representative of the Frankfurt Book Fair to a recent meeting of publishers in the region.

Today was the opening of the 10th Festival du Livres in Mauritius. This is the only book fair I know that’s always held out-of-doors: the weather is so good on this Indian Ocean island (20° S) that the festival is held in tents on the Port Louis waterfront.

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.

This section considers the use of digital technologies in the various business activities of Singapore’s publishers: from content origination through production to marketing and sales.

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.