The irony of the digital revolution is this: as it democratizes publishing, it widens the gap between those with Internet access and those without. For instance, take Wikipedia: this is perhaps the most useful collection of human knowledge ever created. And it’s wonderfully democratic. But where a few years ago you could read a relatively up-to-date paper encyclopedia in your local library, today you can’t — because of Wikipedia. Up-to-date encyclopedic knowledge now exists only online, and if you don’t have Internet access, too bad. The gap between the Internet-haves and the Internet-have-nots is getting wider.

That gap in turn will translate into an education gap, an economic gap, and a healthcare gap.

Wikipedia is a microcosm of the book industry. Hundreds of thousands of books are produced every year, by more and more people, at lower and lower costs, and increasingly unavailable to anyone without Internet access to buy or read them.

I founded Paperight specifically to address that problem …

I hope you’ll head over there and read the rest of the post.

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WB: An organisations ability to innovate is a strategic asset. What is your view on innovation?

AA: Innovation is a bit broad to have ‘a view’ on. It’s a big, complex area. I suppose in short you could say that without innovating, a company will die quickly. But that’s obvious, and not an interesting or useful thing to say. My two favourite takes on how innovation does or can happen are described in Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma and Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup. Both centre around the principle that to innovate you have to be enthusiastic about experimentation and learning from failure. Everything I’ve built at Electric Book Works and Paperight is the product of a long genealogy of experimentation and failure.

WB: How is Paperight set up to drive innovation and not see the same fate as Kontax?

AA: Kontax was great – it proved that teens would read if they had easy access to stories, something many publishers doubted – but it never set out to have a self-sustaining business model. Paperight is structured very differently: it’s a for-profit company with a clear revenue model. This means the team culture is oriented around self-sustainability. Our conversations are literally of a different sort. And then that self-sustainability requires constant innovation. Every day we’re tweaking the system, our marketing messages, our promotional strategies, our approach to content. And those tweaks can add up to or precipitate large strategic shifts.

WB: Do you actively consider the appointment of employees in relation to their ability to contribute to the innovation process?

AA: We’re lucky to have attracted a team of naturally innovative people. I think innovative people get what Paperight is about more quickly than those who think ecosystems are static. So they tend to apply to work with us first. If I’ve had not-very-innovative team members over the years, I suspect they moved on, I can’t even remember. Statically minded people struggle with constant experimentation and failure. Innovative people thrive on it.

WB: Can you explain your organisations culture?

AA: Culture is hard to describe briefly. Perhaps most importantly, we’re a tight-knit team of multi-talented people who focus above all else on shipping – getting stuff done and out the door. But there is so much more to company culture. We follow a similar ethos to two companies who have tried to write describe their culture clearly: Valve (the game-software company) gives its new employees the Valve Handbook, and there’s a lot there that rings true for us. And HubSpot have summarised their culture in a great slide deck. HubSpot’s approach is almost exactly ours, except that we don’t have unlimited vacation time!

WB: Was it a conscious effort to get to this place (the culture mentioned above)?

AA: Absolutely. Culture does not happen by accident. It starts with conscious decisions by a company’s leaders about how a company must feel to be a part of. Then you have to translate that feeling into clear, concrete ways of working that get passed on to the team as they join. Every recruitment decision must take culture into account (I’ve turned away highly talented job applicants because their personalities don’t suit the culture we’re building), but also tiny decisions like where people sit, where and how they make coffee, how meetings are run, what software we use, and how we answer the phone.

WB: Do you mix teams to get the innovation going i.e. a creative with a strategic person?

AA: Yes. There’s no pre-existing formula. But when you put a team together for a project, you’re making a decision about the culture of that project. It will have a subculture of its own, within the greater organisational culture. I take for granted that our project teams will be innovative, but perhaps unconsciously I’d avoid teaming people who as a combination might stifle each others’ ability to innovate.

WB: Do you think innovation is a creative or a strategic spinoff and which type of thinking is better conducive for this?

AA: Creative and strategic ways of thinking can’t be neatly separated. They’re a big grey jumble. Any successful project needs both to be innovative, effective and sustainable. But there’s no recipe.

WB: With the innovation of Paperight, who played the roles of creative and strategist?

AA: Since I’m the sole founder, I suppose I’ve worn both hats. I designed the logo, wrote most of the early messaging, and developed the product-development strategy, for instance. But if I’d been on my own entirely, it all would have sucked. What we’ve done well has only been good because I and my team have actively gathered input from others. You have to be humble about what you can do yourself, and excited about what others bring to a project. In addition to the amazing team I have around me now, over the years my co-workers, friends and suppliers have helped invent and refine many of the creative and strategic innovations at Paperight. Nowadays, my role is to filter that input, organise it usefully, and have a casting vote on what we implement.

WB: Looking at yourself as the leader of a brand awarded with such a prestigious innovation award must feel great and validate your efforts. What qualities do you see compulsory for leaders looking to drive this innovation?

AA: There are many different ways to drive innovation, so there’s probably not a single set of qualities you have to have. If I have to name one, I’d say empathy. You have to be able to put yourself in others’ shoes, to see the world as they do. Who you choose to empathise with may differ: not many would say Steve Jobs was empathetic to his staff, but he was masterfully empathetic to his customers: he understood perfectly what it is and should be like to use a device as a consumer. When I encounter people who struggle to innovate, I get the feeling they’re low on empathy: they’re locked into their own worldview and don’t see the world as others do.

WB: While working in your previous publishing position, did you always look out for ways to innovate?

AA: Absolutely! I genuinely can’t believe everyone isn’t always trying to innovate, whether that means changing the world or changing your doorbell. Wherever a system isn’t perfect, there’s an opportunity to innovate – why wouldn’t you want to take that opportunity? Improving things, doing them in new, better ways is the most fun you can have in life.

WB: In the commercial sense, Amazon did a lot for digital publishing with the Kindle – however, this did not help lower income groups attain quality reading materials. The spinoff for Africa came in the form of Worldreader – looking to bring the e-readers to Africa. This is also happening too slow to get the level of reach and education you are targeting. There will be a stage where the above scenario starts changing and copyshops will then become less frequented (although quite far in the future). How will you position your offering to innovate for such a challenge, or is it something you keep in mind but only assess when you’re at that junction?

AA: Ereading is the future. No question. But that future is much, much further off than most people think. We could build Paperight for twenty years and never run out of customers.

That said, Paperight is a small piece of a bigger puzzle. It may look like we’re just printing books out. What we’re really doing is building a rights marketplace where licences to repackage content are instantly and effortlessly traded. In time, those licences might be for repackaging software, music, or video. Already most African economies are driven by small-scale entrepreneurs who understand their specific local markets. Those entrepreneurs are best placed to know what their communities want and how to package and sell it – not some suit-wearing editor in London or New York. The editor should create great content, and leave it to the entrepreneur to repackage and sell it under licence to specific, local markets.

Most exciting of all, a network of local outlets could produce 3D-printed objects, like crockery or spectacles. Right now, we live in a world where, for the most part, the creators of objects control their design and their physical production: Ikea designs your desk lamp and controls its production. Oakley designs your glasses and controls their production. But production of even the most complex items is getting cheaper and cheaper to do locally, on-demand, using generic tools and open hardware, like 3D printers. In future, Ikea may design your new desk lamp, but your local corner store will print it for you on demand, with a quick, easy licence from Ikea. At that point, I hope we’ll power those licensing platforms, and serve that network of printing and repackaging outlets.

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When my wife Michelle gave birth to our first child, Aidan, last year, I learned some things about the world. I learned that nature doesn’t take prisoners. That labour wards are only pragmatic places, designed to extract one human being from another. And that every news headline, every day, should read ”Woman gives birth to child”.

A hundred years ago, Michelle would not have survived Aidan’s birth. She had a post-partum haemorrhage (PPH), the condition that still kills more new mothers than anything else.

The simplest drug treatment for PPH is Misoprostol. But in many hospitals, especially in the developing world, nurses and midwives aren’t allowed to give Misoprostol (apparently because it can also be used to induce abortion). Only doctors are allowed to prescribe it, even though there are often no doctors around to do so. And many, many women die as a result. It is the most terrifying evidence of our world’s callous misogyny.

Read the full post on Thought Leader.

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Why is there such a clear correlation between a well-written cover letter and an excellent team member? Because of what good writing represents.

Writing is a pinnacle skill. In order to write well, you have to have a range of other skills in place first. They are the underlying foundation. Once you have those other skills, good writing represents their combined result: the pinnacle of their positive effects.

When I read a great piece of writing, I know the writer has those foundational skills. In this diagram I only list a few off the top of my head: empathy (which is an appreciation for what your audience is thinking and feeling), attention to detail, a broad general knowledge, logic, clarity of thought, persuasiveness, the ability to critique your own work (also called a crap detector), an appreciation for rules and the smarts to break them, self-discipline, the ability to prioritise, a sensitivity to cliché and stereotype – and more.

As an employer, that’s much of what I’m looking for. (I do, of course, factor in whether a person is writing in their home language, but even then many of the skills of good writing transcend a person’s grasp of grammar.)

Writing is not a bag of skills learned for their own sake – spelling, grammar, punctuation, metaphor, and so on – though sometimes they’re presented that way. In a recent piece in The Atlantic, Jessica Lahey argues that spelling counts because, in a busy world, people need a quick and superficial way to measure you:

you’ve already spent nine hours today reading through these applications. The one in your hand looks pretty much like all those thousands of others. If only there were some way to decide without having to wade through the 500-word essay about the summer spent digging latrines in Kenya…

And there it is — an easy way out, right there in the third sentence: “The days are hot and dry, your thirsty, tired, and homesick.” Not “you’re,” but “your.” The essay may go on to articulate inspired truths about human nature. It may reveal some novel insight that has never been revealed before. But here’s the rub: This admissions officer with the limited time and frustrated spouse is done. Three lines into the essay, the application lands squarely on the “No” pile.

This example tends to upset my students. They wail, “But that’s unfair! Shouldn’t it be the ideas that count? That’s about appearances, not content!” And they are right. Ideas should be judged on substance rather than appearances, but this simply is not how our world works. We live in a society where appearances matter, where in order to be heard and taken seriously we are judged quickly and superficially.

That’s a shame coming from a writing teacher. It reads like an apology: ‘I’m sorry you have to learn this spelling rubbish, but the world’s so silly about these things!’

There is nothing superficial about judging someone on their spelling. Unless you really are stranded on a desert island without a dictionary, the Internet, or a smart friend, a spelling mistake demonstrates a clear lack of fundamental skill or temperament. Misspellings – especially in business documents – are the symptoms of an underlying carelessness that to employers, clients, colleagues, and fans can and should be deeply troubling.

The quality of your writing is a clear indicator of the quality of your mind. And while spelling is only one part of good writing, it’s a crucial one: get it right, and you give your work a chance to shine – and you to shine through it.

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I have feet in both camps. As someone who genuinely believes widespread literacy could solve deep-rooted problems, open licensing seems to be a necessary leap of faith for any publisher who gives a damn. That’s why at Bettercare we put Creative Commons licences on our books. Still, as someone who needs Bettercare to stay afloat, this gives me the shivers.

At Paperight, too, we struggle with this. We recently spent tens of thousands of rand developing a CC-licensed book that Paperight outlets would sell. When a partner organisation started giving the PDF version away for free, we felt disappointed: those should have been our sales! We need that cash!

Of course, those giveaways were probably never going to be our sales, anyway. The book’s market is huge, so we’ll find our own customers. Still, it stung emotionally. We wondered whether the CC-license was a good idea. And in the absence of real data, emotion rules.

So it’s very encouraging to see that for Pratham Books, sales data clearly shows that open-licensing correlates with increased sales. Not only the licensing, though, but easy, free access to that content, too. In their case, on Scribd:

… when we looked at the cumulative sales data for CC books that were available on Scribd vs. CC books that were not available on Scribd, we were astounded to see that the former outsold the latter in such dramatic fashion in almost a 3:1 ratio. While we would be hesitant to say, given the specifics of our market and our model, that making books openly licensed and available online increased sales, we are a lot more confident in claiming that, at worst, it does not seem to depress sales of those books. And that, in itself, is an important learning for us and as it should be for the rest of the publishing industry.

I highly recommend reading the entire post, which explains how they gathered the data. It wasn’t an easy journey for them either. Just as it isn’t for us.

Luckily, I work with people who are willing to take the leaps of faith we need to overcome our worries and do the right thing. If all goes well, Pratham Books’ experience will be ours, too, and the gods will keep us in lunch.

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I come from Cape Town, South Africa, and my background’s in educational publishing and ebook production. South Africa is like two different countries: about 2 million wealthy people who support the publishing industry (excluding schools publishing, where the state is the largest client by far), and about 48 million people who could never afford an ereader, don’t have credit cards to buy things online, or can’t afford to physically travel to a bookstore. So to make it possible for most people to read books, we need to totally rethink how we sell books. And that’s going to take some disruptive innovations.

A disruptive innovation, as Clayton Christensen describes it in his classic book The Innovator’s Dilemma:

• initially offers lower performance compared to what the mainstream market has historically demanded,
• provides some new performance attributes, which in turn make it prosper in a different market, and
• continually improving in relation to traditional performance parameters, it eventually displaces the former mainstream technology.

Here are three South African initiatives I think fit the bill.

1. The first is books and stories published on South Africa’s biggest mobile phone social network, Mxit.
2. The second is Siyavula, who are producing free, open-licensed textbooks and distributing them in hugely disruptive ways.
3. And the third, if I can be a little presumptuous about its contribution, is my own project, Paperight, where we’re helping the ubiquitous photocopy shop to legally print books out.

So, first, Mxit.

Publishers on Mxit

So from time to time I hear this myth in South Africa that poor people don’t read. And because poverty and race are correlated in South Africa, the implication is that black people don’t read. It’s a massively destructive myth. But a few years ago a project called Kontax (under the Yoza.mobi umbrella project) turned it on its head.

Kontax was a free novella written specifically for teens in the poorest parts of Cape Town to read on their mobile phones. Within one year, it had over 63 000 readers, most of them reading on the Mxit app on their basic phones.

As importantly, the story generated thousands of reader comments, real engagement. The story was serialised at first, written and released in short chapters of about 800 words over a month.

Mxit has about 10 million users in South Africa alone, which till last year was still more than mobile users on Twitter and Facebook combined.

Kontax did not have a self-sustaining business model, but its success in terms of readership was so immense that it inspired other projects to try to build self-sustaining business models in the same space.

The biggest of these is FunDza, a non-profit closely aligned with commercial publisher Cover2Cover.

FunDza puts Cover2Cover’s novellas for teens on Mxit, where some stories are free and others are paid for. Two years since Kontax, FunDza’s books have over 360 000 readers and tens of thousands of comments.

Some of their readers have become authors on the platform themselves.

Bozza is another growing player that started on Mxit, and is now a mobile app of its own that distributes literature in text, audio and video, from poetry to fiction to education, and sells advertising.

Siyavula

So then there’s Siyavula.

Siyavula is a company that produces textbooks that are entirely open-licensed.

You can get their textbooks in print, as PDFs, as web pages on desktop or mobile, and importantly on Mxit. When they launched their high school maths and science textbooks on Mxit last year, within two months they had over 200 000 readers.

They’re a classic disruptive innovation: they started about ten years ago when a group of university students started writing free material for high school students they were tutoring. At the time I was working for a big commercial publisher and I just didn’t take them seriously at all.

But over the years, their textbooks just got better and better, all the time focused on being accessible anywhere and interactive in digital form.

Then in 2011 the national government printed their maths and science textbooks for over two million high school students, and gave them away for free. Commercial publishers were furious, because this directly cut into their sales. But what had happened was simply that a disruptive innovation had its moment. (I talk more about the significance of this moment here.)

And is still having it. Last year and this year the government is printing more Siyavula books for more grades, and the company is expanding beyond maths and science books.

So what’s the business model?

The company doesn’t sell content, but rather the support and training services that surround a full implementation of transmedia learning materials. And they sell intelligent assessment: an interactive question-and-answer platform that adjusts difficulty levels based on students’ performance.

Their technology is years ahead of anything local publishers have available, and it totally snuck up on traditional publishers.

Paperight

Third, let me say a little about my own project, called Paperight.

Now, I love fantastic digital-only innovations like books on Mxit and Siyavula. They are critical and important. But their digital reach is still limited to a minority of South Africans who can get online on their phones and afford the data costs. There are millions more who can’t. South Africa’s recent census showed that 65% of South Africans have no Internet access at all. The same is true of many countries in Africa.

So a few years ago I started looking at whether print-on-demand could help us, and as I looked for smaller and smaller print-on-demand factories, I eventually found myself staring at a hair salon in my street with a copy-printer at the back. It was a potential print-on-demand bookstore. All it needed was book content, and the right to legally print it out.

So we built Paperight.

The Paperight site, paperight.com, is the tool that has helped us build a network of independent copy shops that print books out quickly and legally. On the site, we provide the automatic licensing and content that enables even tiny, rural copy shops to print out books on any old printer. If a business has an Internet connection and a printer, they can be a bookstore.

After a few years of research and piloting, we launched paperight.com last May, and we’ve already got 145 active outlets, small printing businesses mostly around South Africa that sell low-cost print-outs of books to people who’d never get to a big-city bookstore, or ever get online.

It works because, often, all you need is a quick, cheap printout.

We work directly with publishers to prepare content and set rights fees. Each copy shop outlet has a prepaid account with us, and as they download books, the publisher earns the rights fee. We take 20% of the rights fee.

This is a conservative example: a 300-page novel we sell on Paperight. You can see that the publisher can earn the same gross profit from traditional and Paperight editions, and yet the overall price to the consumer is less. More importantly, the consumer hasn’t had to travel to a bookstore: they could get this book from any business with a copy-printer and Internet connection.

So far, we have 40 publishers on the platform, and over 1400 books. And we’re selling books in places where no bookstores have ever existed.

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Yesterday’s TEDxAIMS was incredible. AIMS is the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, an institution that provides full one-year, live-in scholarships to post-grad sciences students from around Africa, and leads the inspiring Next Einstein Initiative. I spoke about my experiences trying to build fancy-tech products in South Africa, and my belief that for as long as we think “technology spreads quickly”, we’ll be working on the wrong problems.

Update 19 Feb 2013: I’ve now added the video. The text of the talk is below.

Hi. I’m Arthur and I’m a textbook publisher turned technologist.

I used to work for some really big publishing companies, till in 2006 I left them to co-found an ebook production company. I thought ebook technology was moving fast, and that I was just in time to catch the ebook wave. Sony Reader and Mobipocket had been around for years already, and Amazon would soon launch its Kindle ereader. So we were ready to rock. And I was going to be rich!

And then, here in South Africa, for four years, nothing happened. We waited and waited for the imminent ebook revolution, surviving by doing any old work we could find, and experimenting like crazy on our own projects.

At one stage, we started publishing nursing textbooks, and we wanted the nurses to be able to take exams and get certificates online. So we built a website for this. But we soon discovered that many of the nurses didn’t even have email addresses or Internet access. Some didn’t know the difference between a username and a coupon code. And importantly, they didn’t have to know in order to be great nurses.

By the time we shut it down, we’d spent over R100000 on that site, and made back about R3000, in three years.

We kept losing money on projects like this, until we just couldn’t any more, and by 2011 we were dead.

I closed our offices. I retrenched my friends. I begged extensions from our creditors. And I took on a freelance print-layout job. I felt like an idiot.

As they say, being early is the same as being wrong. I had been working on tomorrow’s problems, and I hadn’t tackled the problems people had today.

Today’s problems can present real obstacles to new technology. Recently I was a tech advisor on a project to put ereaders into some local schools. We faced challenges like how to set up and maintain a safe WIFI network at a school. That was complex enough, but what really set us back was simple: could we give a 12-year-old child a valuable device to carry home, when they have to walk through a dangerous area every day? None of us wanted to put that child at risk, even if most of the kids would be fine.

We were facing the reality that for most people, new technology spreads slowly. Yet the myth that new technology spreads quickly is so entrenched in our thinking that it’s almost impossible to escape. It’s such a common assumption that we don’t even question it.

For instance, we’re told and we believe that the mobile web is moving like lightning through Africa. Then why, according to our recent census, do 65 per cent of South Africans have no Internet access at all? Why, five years since M-PESA revolutionised low-cost banking in Kenya, do we still not have a mobile-banking service in South Africa that the poor can afford?

Last month, a report said that broadband access in South Africa had more than doubled in the last two years. Is that fast? Well, it sounds fast. But if we remove the celebratory tone from the press release, maybe it isn’t. Broadband penetration increased from 5% to 11% of South Africans. So, here’s the most revolutionary, democratising, business-enabling technology ever invented and in two whole years we shift the needle by a measly 6 per cent.

New technology spreads slowly.

And if we want to tackle the really pressing, really interesting challenges of today, we have to accept that. We have to acknowledge that new technology seeps through society at the same oozing speed as everything else that’s new and different.

Why was it so hard for me to realise this; that I was working on tomorrow’s problems?

Well, I like gadgets. I build websites as a hobby. I read ebooks on my phone. I’d rather Skype the person sitting next to me than actually talk to them. I rely heavily on technology to organise my life. It makes me feel powerful.

So I also wanted my company to be about technology. I wanted it to be sexy and technically brilliant. I wanted to have ‘Featured on TechCrunch’ on our home page. I wanted to build products that I thought were impressive. And I wanted to feel smart for being at the forefront of this technological goldrush we’re always hearing about.

Everything we technologists do and everything we read about tells us we’re powerful and sexy.

And we pay a lot of money for that privilege.

Most of us have a good mobile phone and a computer. We get online every day, without thinking what it really costs us: our ISP and our WIFI router, our credit-based cellphone contract with our data bolt-on. Living in a suburb with computer shops nearby. The time to read tech articles. Going to schools and jobs with others who have fancy new devices.

All the things that make us tech-savvy cost money, even if we don’t notice we’re spending it.

Sexy. Powerful. Wealthy.

So the most difficult thing for a technologist to learn is humility. It’s difficult to accept that what we make are just tools, and that we often make those tools unnecessarily complicated because we want them to make us look more sexy and more powerful.

If we’re lucky, that humility is forced upon us: there is nothing sexy or powerful about shuttering a company that no one wants, about begging for credit, or retrenching your friends.

Humble technology doesn’t even have to be electronic. One of the simplest technologies in the world is a well-placed checklist. In his fantastic book The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande tells us that applying a simple checklist in hospital settings, particularly in surgery, can dramatically reduce complications and deaths. It’s hard to believe that for all our medical wizardry the thing that could really matter when you’re in hospital is a simple, written checklist.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy to make one: even a short checklist can take years of research and testing to get right. But once it’s done, its impact can be astonishing.

There are places in South Africa where a good checklist could save many lives. Our Free State province has the worst infant-mortality rate in the country. In some districts, more than one in ten babies die, most of those born prematurely. The crazy thing is that the situation can be so simply improved without high-end training or expensive machinery. Just three things can save the vast majority of premature babies: keeping a baby skin-to-skin with its mother or father, air from a simple ventilator, and a dose of surfactant (a substance in our lungs that stops them collapsing).

There is nothing futuristic or complicated about useful technology. It’s often quite ordinary. It’s so simple it’s almost invisible. And it’s driven by people who are more interested in solving problems than in building impressive products.

Now, as technologists and entrepreneurs, what would happen to our work if we accepted that new technology spreads really, really slowly? Would we also slow down?

I don’t think we would. I think we’d work more effectively. I think we’d be more focused on solving urgent problems in simple ways. On building more effective, more appropriate technologies that people can use immediately.

In my work, I’ve largely abandoned my attempts to make and sell ebooks. At Bettercare, we only sell our nursing books in print now. And at Paperight, we’re building a network of print-on-demand bookstores just by helping copy shops legally print out books on any old printer. So we’ve empowered small printing businesses to act as bookstores in small towns and rural villages, working from shops and homes and even containers across the country, delivering cheap print-outs of books to people who’d never get to a big-city bookstore otherwise.

And it works because sometimes all you need is a quick, cheap print-out.

I’m not saying we should never work on powerful, impressive technology. Building the future is important, even if we’re not solving the problems of today. It can answer big questions, and help solve some of the problems of the future before we get there. But it’s an ivory tower, and we should acknowledge that.

We don’t need fancy technology to help people read, to teach, or to save mothers and babies. We need a humble kind of problem solving.

Technologists who understand existing technology are brilliantly placed to find simple solutions. They know a technology’s most stable, reliable, and universally compatible features.

If we can turn that knowledge to solving today’s problems, we can get a lot more done than if we try to solve tomorrow’s.

Thank you.

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Here is an excerpt from my notes for the talk.

I think the real challenge for publishing is to appeal to new markets of young people in places where there are no bookstores or libraries or electronics stores or affordable Internet data. The size of the markets we’ve been selling to for the last hundred years are a drop in the ocean compared to this audience. Most are in developing countries.
We have to introduce completely new value propositions for these markets. A value proposition means: what do you get for how much money and in what way?
Clayton Christensen explained in The Innovator’s Dilemma fifteen years ago why it’s extremely difficult for established companies to create new value propositions. Often, the only way to do it is through acquisition or by spinning out entirely independent business units that can experiment freely and fail with confidence.
So the most promising innovations are most likely going to come from small players, who are able to grow in emerging markets with low margins.
No market needs a new value proposition more than the poor in developing countries, like the forty million people in South Africa who’ve likely never bought a book, but who all have a mobile phone and limited access to data. There is today simply no compelling reason for them to buy a printed book or an ebook given current prices and processes.
Three South African platforms in particular are tackling low literacy and book-purchasing rates in this market by changing the traditional publishing value proposition:
1. The first is a family of projects publishing stories on mobile phone app Mxit;
2. the second integrates textbooks with online media optimised for phones; and
3. the third is my own project, helping the ubiquitous photocopy shop legally print books out anywhere.

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Yes, we should provide local entrepreneurs and grassroots non-profits with tools – and where appropriate and requested, expertise – but we shouldn’t develop solutions to problems we don’t understand, we shouldn’t take ownership of a problem that isn’t ours and we certainly shouldn’t build things thousands of miles away and then jump on a plane in search of a home for them.

Highly recommended reading.

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