A massive shift has taken place in South African schoolbook publishing in the last month. We can’t predict the effects it will have, but they will be significant. The Department of Basic Education has printed open-licensed science and maths textbooks for every grade 10 learner in the country, and will follow up with grades 11 and 12 soon. I’ve heard estimates that this is around two [update: two-and-a-half] million textbooks in each grade.

Until now, textbooks have been procured by commercial means, almost all developed by commercial publishing houses. While for many years government has toyed with the idea of producing textbooks centrally, for good reasons (and not a little lobbying by the publishers’ association) it has never been done. But when offered a good, open-licensed textbook written by volunteers and developed by Siyavula (a Shuttleworth Foundation project), the DBE decided that printing and distributing these to schools countrywide could be a key part of improving science and maths education in South Africa. Continue reading →

Publishers are having to take in a lot right now. They’re told to act like software businesses, innovate like startups, think like the music industry, learn from railroad and car companies, reskill, upskill, change suppliers, build distributed workflows, and reinvent their content models and revenue streams. And as they get more and more overwhelmed by all this pressure, a kind of paralysis can set in. Or an expensive kind of writhing in quicksand.

Stop a second. Publishers have wicked entrepreneurial skills. Perhaps they know everything they need to know already, and just need to recognise it. Continue reading →

UPDATED, 15 Dec 2012: Today I received a considered response from David O’Brien, GM of Customer Engagement at Old Mutual. I’ve added it below. Thanks, too, to Ursula van der Westhuizen at Old Mutual for getting in touch about it.

I’m an Old Mutual client – I have a retirement annuity with them. Today I received from them the crappiest calendar I have ever seen. Is it a Christmas gift? It’s not even pretending to be one. A gift would be something you might want to keep. An advert? It’s a pretty awful advert. And it certainly won’t do what the cover letter hopes it will: “May this calendar remind you every day that as an Old Mutual customer you can count our advice and full support as you strive to achieve your lifetime goals.” Full support? Your customer support is about as utterly ordinary as anyone else’s. Advice? From the wise guys that produced this thing? Continue reading →