In two announcements made at the London Book Fair, the Quarto Group, a global illustrated book publisher, unveiled plans for Quarto Innovation, a new business development unit, and launched a joint venture with the Sharjah-based Kalimat Group to produce Arab-language books.
Quarto Innovation will be under the direction of Frank Chambers. The newly formed unit will focus on developing new ways to sell the publisher’s broad range of content and brands via new channels. In addition, Carolina Conner, a senior member of the Quarto foreign rights team, has been named business development director of Quarto Innovation.
Chambers said “working with a broad range of publishing and nonpublishing partners, we will find new ways to create content our customers need.”
The newly announced Arab-language joint venture with the Kalimat Group will be called Kalimat Quarto. The unit will use titles from Quarto Group’s English language imprints and republish and distribute the titles in Arabic throughout the Middle East and North African beginning in 2017.
Kalimat Quarto will focus initially on cooking, a new category for Kalimat, and will expand to other categories such as children’s books as the new venture grows.
Marcus Leaver, Chief Executive of Quarto, called the partnership, “exciting and it raises the bar yet again for further partnerships in other territories.”
Bodour bint Sultan Al Quasimi, founder and CEO of the Kalimat Group, said, the coventure, “represents an exciting opportunity for Kalimat Group to expand its offerings in a new segment of publishing.”
