Press

8 Questions for PETER SCHOPPERT, President of Singapore Book Publishers Association
SD Original, November 30. 1999
SD: Dear Mr. Schoppert, what have you been busy with lately?
PS: My own publishing house, NUS Press, is busy building new distribution networks and launching a new series of books on art and art history. It’s a lot of work! At the Singapore Book Publishers Association we’re focussing on building up a full-time Secretariat and planning how to bring the local industry to a new level.
SD: How is Singapore publishing market doing right now, what are the latest trends and developments?
PS: Singapore has publishers in trade, education and STM/Professional markets. Local trade publishing is quite buoyant at the moment, with local players stepping up the quality of their output, in fiction, general non-fiction and children’s books particularly. There’s a lot of energy in local publishing just now, and an increasing presence of locally-published books in a local market that is still dominated by imports. Bookshops are holding steady thank goodness, over the last year or so.
SD: Anything particular with regard to e-books and digital education in Singapore?
PS: Consumer ebooks have taken off in Singapore, but mostly through our public library which has what looks like more than 80% market share. In education, schools are focussing more and more on teamwork and user-directed learning. Digital systems and materials are central to this approach. But there’s a bit of uncertainty as to the best curricular materials to support these new priorities, including a new focus on values-based education. We’re thinking hard about how industry can best partner the schools to develop and innovate in these areas.
SD: How many members does SBPA has? How important is the Singapore publishing market to SEA and Asia?
PS: We have around 70 members, from one-man show SMEs to the largest multinational players. Singapore is not a huge market itself, around $500m, but we are very well-connected across the region. We are a very open market, and our population speaks several global languages: English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil. Our local publishers have to compete with the best of New York, London, Beijing and Shanghai, Hong Kong and Taipei, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta and Chennai, but we can also export to those markets.
SD: You come to China on a regular basis. How is the cooperation between China and Singapore?
PS: There is a lot of energy for cooperation between Chinese and Singaporean publishers, as there is a lot of interest in Singapore about China and vice versa. The rights business is healthy and growing, but given that Singapore also uses simplified Chinese characters there’s room for more trade in printed books between the two countries. The industries are structured quite differently, and of course there is a big difference in scale, so we still have a lot to learn about each other.
SD: What kind of effect can government initiatives like the One belt one road Initiative or the Singaporean efforts to support the creative industries actually have for publishers and the publisher associations of the area?
PS: As a non-fiction and scholarly publisher, my publishing house, NUS Press, sees a lot of interest from Chinese publishers in books that try and understand the complicated history that we share, the human links between China and Southeast Asia, relations across the South China Sea. Government incentives are useful of course, but only go so far: we get most progress when we are able to build relationships with Chinese publishers and share in a very open way the sorts of books that we are interested in, that might work for us in our territories.
SD: You once blogged that Frankfurt Book Fair “should be moved to Cannes". Do you think the book industry needs more glamour?
PS: Haha! I attended the Cannes Film Festival a few years ago and I really admired the way it blends a serious appreciation of film culture, together with a commercial marketplace and a glamorous venue for promoting big-selling films. I think we can all learn from that combination in promoting the different aspects of our industry.
SD: What do you expect from your participation at the StoryDrive conference in Beijing?
PS: I love meeting publishers. They are interesting people and we share so much across our national cultures and the social and political settings where we operate. I’m looking forward to building more links between publishers, as we need to share information and work together to promote book culture around the world.
PETER SCHOPPERT(彼得•舒佩特) will be speaking at the StoryDrive Conference in Beijing (29 -30 May 2016).