2020 New Year Message 1 January 2020

Dear readers, Happy New Year to you all! We hope you celebrated the start of 2020—in fact, the start of a new decade—in good spirits with family and friends and, obviously, brought along a good book. Now that we’re entering the new year, it’s good to look ahead and think about what this year may bring us. But first, a quick look back.

2019 was quite a year for all of us at Kawah Buku. We’ve been through many developments, sometimes in less than favourable circumstances. But we’ve also achieved a huge amount. Our most momentous one was the publication of Surah-Surah Terlarang: Persoalan Nasional, which marked our first step into the publishing world through the imprint of Soeloeh Merdeka Publishing. Kawah Buku, through Soeloeh Merdeka, is also actively seeking out a few publishing rights from a few university presses in the United States and the United Kingdom, especially for Malay translation rights and distribution rights. We anticipate our next publication will be available at the end of February 2020.

We also took the initiative to launch a podcast channel, named Teh Tarik Podcast, as part of our effort to maximise our reach and customer pool among podcast listeners, especially those in urban areas of Malaysia. Of course, there’s still a lot of work ahead. We trust in the growth process, and all of these are the processes to be taken seriously, decisively, and swiftly as we can in 2020.

Coming to the end of 2019, Kawah Buku finally able to offer worldwide shipping—from the Pacific Islands to the coast of Peru, from snowy Iceland to another snowy-end in Tasmania—thanks to the Stripe payment gateway and POS Malaysia (International). Using the Stripe service enables our website to receive payments through credit and debit cards without requiring a PayPal account or any other third parties.

The past three years (indeed, we are in the fourth year of our journey already) have had a significant impact on all of us, but we would like to thank our readers for their significant and continuous support and trust during this growth-filled yet challenging period. The year ahead will bring its challenges, but we are sure nothing is impossible.