Global 50 CEO Talk with Ashleigh Gardner (Wattpad WEBTOON Studios) and Michael Tamblyn (Rakuten Kobo): “Beyond Publishers: New facets of the global book business today

The Global 50 CEO Talk 2022, held in partnership with the Frankfurt Book Fair on Wednesday, October 19, 2022, from 14.00 to 15.00, will explore the book business beyond traditional publishers.

In recent years, the novel ways of how authors exploit their intellectual property (or IP) have opened wide and highly productive fields of creation, radically expanding what books, publishing and reading encompasses today:

Authors are building critical communities of readers online;

Well established bestselling authors are going ‘direct’ by publishing their books themselves;

Cross-media exploitation intertwining books, movies and games have expanded;

Industry sized cooperations between digital platforms and retailers have become well established practices;

With the success of graphic novels and manga, traditional boundaries between gernes of  narrative fiction have blurred;

New business models have surged, including freemium and subscription, curated access to collections and both broad as well as highly specialized niche collections of titles.

This year’s CEO Talk will shed light on the game changing dynamics resulting from these non-traditional publishing models and explore the opportunities with thought leaders from two of the world’s largest platforms in this regard:

Ashleigh Gardner (Wattpad WEBTOON, Canada/Korea), and Michael Tamblyn (Kobo Rakuten, Canada).

The Global 50 CEO Talk is prepared in conjunction with the Global 50 Publishing Ranking of the publishing industry, mapping the 50 largest publishing corporations each year since 2007.

This ranking is listing the world’s 50 largest publishing companies, who in 2021 generated publishing revenues of 58.8 bnEUR in 2021 (66.7 bnUSD).

The Global 50 Publishing Ranking is researched by Ruediger Wischenbart Content and Consulting, and published by Bookdao (PR China), The Bookseller (UK), buchreport (Germany), Livres Hebdo (France) and Publishers Weekly (US).

The Global 50 Ranking and CEO Talk are supported by Bookwire (www.bookwire.de(opens in a new window) ).

The full Global 50 report, with the big list, an analysis and data rich company profiles will be available as a digital publication of around 250 pages from late September 2022 at www.wischenbart.com/ranking(opens in a new window) , and at websites of Bookwire, Bookdao, Livres Hebdo and Publishers Weekly.