And goodness knows it needs acceleration. Under EPUB 2.0, even market leaders took their time implementing support for basic features.

Yay, right? Depends who you are. EPUB 3.0 is a great step forward technologically. It adds “video, audio, interactivity, vertical writing and other global language capabilities, improved accessibility, MathML, and styling and layout enhancements” (IDPF PR).

But for publishers, these possibilities extend the technical skill level required to create market-wowing products. EPUB 3.0 has great bells and important whistles, but you’re going to need actual software-development skills in-house to use them properly. In other words, ebooks just took a big step towards becoming software, rather than elaborate text files.

This is huge for publishing businesses, many of whom are only beginning to get their teams’ heads around reflowable text. Add the need to cost for a software development process to compete in, say, the college market, and you’ve got instant editorial heart failure.

Sure, publishers don’t have to use all these new features, and most won’t need to. But the shift in emphasis in ebook standards – from text to software – is real and significant, and will give companies with tech skills a real advantage at the high end of the market. These companies are not usually publishing companies, either: retail and technology companies (think Apple, Google, Amazon and a host of their startup competitors) are far better placed to seize the day here.

Iheed

Iheed is Irish Global Health Education Innovation. They’re working in Uganda and Bangladesh, and focus on the education of community health workers:

Iheed will focus its efforts on the training of community health workers as critical frontline healthcare providers in the delivery of primary healthcare to communities, in particular women and children, utilising innovative approaches, and leveraging the rapidly growing area of mobile technologies as a means of channelling health education materials and messages in an appropriate and user-friendly manner to effect behaviour change which ultimately benefits our target groups.

Baobab Health

Baobab Health Trust – originally founded n the US – is an NGO in Malawi that develops software and hardware for use in Malawian clinics and hospitals. They focus on simple, touch-screen systems. According to their site, the systems are in use at about a dozen sites.

eMOCHA

eMOCHA is an open-source software project. It has two components: an app for Android-based phones, and server software for communicating with the phones. The app can be used to send training materials (including video and quizzes), to gather patient data (in secure forms), and, being a phone and all, to call a doctor.

Global Health Media Project

The Global Health Media Project develops short videos that provide knowledge and skills to healthcare professionals in resource-poor settings. The videos are then freely distributed as broadly as possible. According to their blog, their four-minute ‘Story of Cholera‘ will hopefully soon be in multiple languages around the world:

The film … has already been requested for use in Haiti, Ghana, Cameroon, Zambia, Congo, and Thailand. We are currently working on narrating the film in multiple languages to make it more useful in cholera-affected regions around the world.

I haven’t been able to speak to these organisations or test their products. But in all four cases, there’s a lot of vision overlap here with our work at Paperight (distributing healthcare materials. among other things) and EBW Healthcare (developing and publishing healthcare learning kits). So I hope our paths cross before long.

Ladipo Market in Lagos, Nigeria [is] part of a $10 trillion worldwide economy known as System D.

You probably have never heard of System D. Neither had I until I started visiting street markets and unlicensed bazaars around the globe.

System D is a slang phrase pirated from French-speaking Africa and the Caribbean. The French have a word that they often use to describe particularly effective and motivated people. They call them débrouillards. To say a man (or woman) is a débrouillard(e) is to tell people how resourceful and ingenious he or she is. The former French colonies have sculpted this word to their own social and economic reality. They say that inventive, self- starting, entrepreneurial merchants who are doing business on their own, without registering or being regulated by the bureaucracy and, for the most part, without paying taxes, are part of “l’economie de la débrouillardise”. Or, sweetened for street use, “Systeme D”. This essentially translates as the ingenuity economy, the economy of improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, economy.

He goes on to quote MTN’s Akinwale Goodluck: “The umbrella market is a very, very important market now […] No serious operator can afford to ignore the umbrella people.” System D will be a major growth driver in Africa and elsewhere for many years, and sensible businesses in many industries will find ways to build on it. It’s certainly where I’ll be pushing Paperight.

Read the rest of the article. (Thanks to Emeka Okafor for pointing to it.)

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.

At last night’s announcement of the class-of-2011 matric results, the Minister of Basic Education explained:

We have a strategy in place which we will vigorously implement in 2012 to improve the pass rate and the quality of Mathematics and Physical Science – the National Strategy for Mathematics, Science and Technology Education.

Our focus will be on four areas: (1) improving the participation and performance of girl learners; (2) helping schools to improve learners’ subject choices; (3) ensuring correct placement of teachers; and (4) focusing teacher development efforts on subject and pedagogical content knowledge.

A vital part of our strategy is working with partners, including those in the private sector, higher education institutions and NGOs. These partners are numerous, but I want to mention the Shuttleworth Foundation which has developed maths and science textbooks for Grades 10, 11 and 12, free of charge. We will distribute them to schools as from this year.

This changes the game. Publishers I’ve talked to recently, who’ve been aware of this for the last few months, are naturally concerned that schools will not buy commercial textbooks if they’re getting free ones, despite the DBE’s alleged assurance that the Siyavula books are intended to be supplementary.

But that is just the kindling to a fire that could change South African schoolbook publishing even more significantly. A precedent has been set: the DBE printing open-licensed materials from a non-traditional publisher on a massive scale. Today, the right team of pros can produce open-licensed textbooks in months and pitch them to the DBE. Tomorrow, these might be ebooks or software on tablet computers. Their development might not be funded by a social-impact foundation, but a corporate sponsor. They could be produced as part of broader business models that involve teachers, learners, schools, device makers, distributors or printers. And the teams that produce them could do so under far better circumstances than the badly paid, debilitating, high-pressure environment that schoolbook production teams have become used to, often to their personal detriment.

If you’re looking for a turning point in South African publishing, this might just be it.

(Disclosure: As a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow, I get a close view of what the Siyavula team are doing. I’m not directly involved in this project. I’ve also worked as a consultant for many South African educational publishing companies, and am actively working to build partnerships with them for Paperight.)

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

A publisher is an investor. The publisher is the one who puts up the money. Publishers are the angel investors of the reading world. They’ve been angel investing for hundreds of years in countless tiny businesses, whose founders are their authors – and whom, in the case of responsible investors, they nurture and support.

Not only are publishing companies angel investors, but they’re startup incubators for each of these little businesses, assigning mentors and advisors (usually as editors) and marketing teams to each investment, and pooling administrative overheads to allow founders to focus on their core genius. Incubators believe that helping founders focus on their core genius is critical to success.

As a publisher I know: often we lose on our investments. For most publishers, a minority of successes fund the majority of failures. But that’s the game. We’re ego-driven risk-takers.

It’s a harrowing job, investing. Investments have to follow customer needs, which shift with fashion, the economy, social change, and other environmental pressures. Publishers who’ve stayed successful have done so because they’ve been responsive to these factors, balancing passion and gut-feel with brutal honesty and uncompromising financial decision-making. They’ve become lay-experts in their authors’ fields. They’ve sought out user feedback and acted on it. They’ve turned seemingly unworkable investments into million-dollar successes, and left hard-working authors by the wayside for hard-nosed business reasons.

That’s exactly the nous they can turn to their own businesses now. As a publisher, if your company were a book and you its author, what would you do?

You’d want you to focus on your core genius: finding talent and investing in it. Nurture your founder self. Pool and outsource admin, coding and distribution to people who love doing that stuff, because you don’t. Embrace risk and brace for losses. Celebrate every tiny success. In other words, nothing you haven’t done already for others, a thousand times over.

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?

Why am I so offended? Because in South Africa today, corporate waste is an insult. The calendar is an affront to anyone who cares about education, health or the environment. For the price of printing and distributing these calendars, every school in the country could have received a dozen educational posters, or a book for a library, or nurses could have received training materials or personal-success literature. At the very least, not producing this wasteful thing would have saved us all the environmental costs of printing and shipping them.

Mine’s going straight into the recycling, where it may do some good. I have nicer things to put on my walls, as I’m sure do most Old Mutual clients. Next time, I want to get an email saying they’ve spent the millions this would have cost on something South Africa actually needs.

Follow-up

I received this reply by email (my comments section here can’t take such long replies) on 15 December 2012:

Dear Arthur,

Many thanks for the feedback, which we always welcome. We’re sorry that you did not enjoy the Old Mutual calendar. Our calendar is much loved by the many people who have received one over many years.

It has a simple format which makes it extremely functional. This year, we have distributed thousands of calendars and the overwhelming response to the calendar from our customers have been very positive.

Old Mutual does not subscribe to corporate waste. The recycling of our waste paper is a key support stream for the Oasis School for the disabled in Cape Town, creating both income and employment. This calendar is part of an engagement program which has converted millions of printed pages into e-mails through the course of 2011. I am delighted to note that we correspond with yourself via e-mail. We have also increased registered users of our website by 40% through communication. I also want to point out that we have planted a sustainable olive grove on behalf of our customers, to benefit a community in years to come.

All of the other good ideas you mention – ranging from financial education to sustainable business ventures – are in progress via the Old Mutual Foundation where OM deploys 1% of its net profits after tax on many projects throughout the country. You can find evidence of these valuable initiatives on our website (www.oldmutual.co.za)

I am very keen to hear about your experience of our ordinary customer support. This year we have implemented a customer feedback survey on the majority of touch points so that we can hear firsthand about the areas that we need to improve on. We were the highest scoring long term insurance company in the Ask Afrika Orange Index service study for the 4th year running.

So – while we believe we are working hard in the right direction – we are always open to listen.

If you do not wish to use your calendar, I am happy if you’ll return it to me for recycling. Furthermore, I will also honour your wish to remove your name from our distribution list for future purposes.

Kind regards

David O’Brien

General Manager : Customer Engagement

Old Mutual

I really appreciate this reply, and the work Old Mutual does for social and environmental impact. That said, I still believe in this day and age sending a printed calendar to every client is not a great idea, even if you are receiving positive responses to it from some of them. (I.e. a positive response doesn’t mean what you’re doing is right.) But these are opinions, not data-driven arguments. If we’re all engaged in the steady, tricky process of figuring out the best way to grow businesses and do good at the same time, and as long as these things are thought through carefully beforehand, we’re all on the right track.

I’m unashamedly an Amazon Kindle fan. Not of the device, the tech, or even the generally great prices, but because the customer service is in a league so far above anything else that buying anything else right now is just masochistic. Moreover, there are free Kindle apps for all your other devices, too (phone, PC, tablet), and they’re as nice or nicer to use than their competitors’ software. The Kindle is absolutely the way to go.If you’re buying a Kindle device, there are a few options, but in South Africa there are two I’d go with, if your budget’s around R1500:

$79, basic WIFI Kindle: This is Amazon’s entry-level Kindle. It’s WIFI-only (so you have to connect to a nearby open WIFI network to get books on it), and there are ads on the home page (this brings the price down, and I think that’s worth it). With this one, you could also get a cover (here are some) and ship it within a R1500 budget. Update: Unfortunately this deal isn’t available in South Africa, we get the same Kindle for $109.

$139, Kindle with keyboard and free 3G: This has the big added advantage of having free 3G (i.e. no need for WIFI access) so you can get books on it anywhere there’s cell reception. The keyboard is nice if you want to make notes in your ebooks and for searching for books on Amazon’s Kindle store on the device. If your budget will manage it, definitely go for this one. You can always find a cover from a local store later or make something yourself (here are fifty suggestions!). This one also has ads on the home page; you can pay an extra $50 for one without the ads, but I don’t see the point. Update: Seems in South Africa we can only buy without the ads, $189.

In South Africa you can buy the basic Kindle from Incredible Connection, but it can cost more overall than buying it direct from Amazon. And shipping from Amazon usually takes less than a week, depending what options you choose when you buy. Happy shopping!

PS: Some South African publishers are working hard to get local books on the Kindle store. Buy South African authors to support them wherever you can. Many local publishers have historically relied on selling imported books here (representing overseas publishers) to subsidise their publishing of local authors. Kindle, for all its loveliness, is killing the market for imported print books in South Africa. That’s an unavoidable casualty in our changing industry. So to keep our literary culture as bright and growing as it is, we’re going to need to consciously support those local authors and publishers for a few years while they find a new equilibrium. At the same time, we need to keep up the pressure on local publishers to get more of their books into the Kindle store.

The first thing has been to get a working demo, or prototype site, up and running, so that we can show the service to others, test some ideas, and develop our vocabulary and sign-up documents in a live environment. So I knocked that together in WordPress during September, along with a bunch of back-room workflow tests and documentation. It’s been hugely valuable.

With that done, it was time to start talking seriously to rightsholders, licensing agencies and content aggregators. So in October I headed off to the Frankfurt Book Fair and London to speak to a wide range of people. And the response was, almost entirely, overwhelmingly positive.

Two years ago, when I first asked publishers about the Paperight concept, they were cautiously optimistic, but many were worried about how their books would look, and how much they would cost to consumers. Luckily for us, since then Amazon Kindle has shown that most readers just want stories and info, and that easy, affordable distribution is often more important than high-end production values when you’re growing a market. Suddenly a book printed out on A4 paper seems just fine. Especially if it’s on every street corner in countries you’ve never sold in before.

So there were far fewer concerns from publishers about Paperight in 2011 than in 2009. Where there were concerns, they have been really helpful in tailoring our message. I certainly have a much better idea of what makes publishers interested in using Paperight. One key issue – which I discussed recently on the Paperight blog – is that Paperight can compete with piracy on accessibility, convenience, and often in total cost (energy, time, money).

Our messaging is captured largely in our rightsholder agreement, which is really short, and in plain language. It took a lot of time and effort to get it that way. This is really important to us, because Paperight is built on the idea that the once arcane world of rights and licensing can actually be managed simply, and anyone can participate in it. I went through the distribution contracts of a bunch of other businesses, took the most important concepts, and boiled them down to simple sentences and paragraphs. The input of Foundation alumnus Andrew Rens was really valuable here, too. It’s something we’ll constantly evolve, but I’m pleased with the way we’ve started.

Another important area of our messaging is pricing. Most people find it hard to believe it can be cheaper to print a book out than to buy a copy that the publisher printed in its thousands. But now we can show in most cases that that isn’t true. In the video that goes with this post, I give a concrete example of how a publisher can earn as much from a Paperight sale as from a conventional book sale, and yet save the consumer more than 25% on the retail price of the conventional edition.

My conversations with rightsholders and others have also led to discussions about putting a range of non-book content on Paperight, including newspapers, exams, sheet music, classifieds and administrative documents.

The process of prioritising and prepping this content will fall to our content manager. Tarryn-Anne Anderson joined us in November to work on this. Over the next couple of months, she’ll also be putting together a print catalogue of books and documents we think people will like, and we’ll put that catalogue in copy shops around the country. It’ll include textbooks, novels, past matric exam papers, how-to guides and more. And from that we hope to learn more about what print-shop customers are likely to find most valuable.

Meanwhile, all along I’ve been working on a redesigned site that will replace the working prototype in the first half of next year. It’s simpler and will be much faster. And it’ll give us the ability to distribute certain documents in certain regions, which is crucial to publishers who want to reach new markets without competing, for now, with their conventional editions in their home markets.

This means long hours studying and developing user interface and user experience best practice, and chatting to print-shop managers about how their stores work, and how the Paperight site can best work at their point of sale.

Working with the Foundation has been fantastic. I get to share ideas with and learn from a group of seriously amazing people, who’re working in mobile technology, user-created publishing, biocultural communities, open knowledge and educational resources, peer education, open data, citizen cyberscience, new approaches to IP, and more. And the Foundation staff work tirelessly to support our work and help us focus on making an impact. They all make the Paperight team much bigger than it seems on paper.

I taught myself from online resources. There were three parts to it:

1. I learned how to use InDesign well – this isn’t strictly necessary, but made a huge difference to my efficiency later on. I still use InDesign to format text for ebooks, because its styling process is so powerful and efficient, and these days it exports pretty tidy HTML afterwards (inside its epub files).
2. I learned HTML and CSS. This took several years dabbling with websites (I built the first arthurattwell.com in really crappy HTML in 2000 – here it is in 2003). There are a billion sites that will teach you this stuff, but the best overall resource is probably w3schools.com. HTML and CSS are the heart of any ebook.
3. Finally, I combined these two areas to create ebooks. I’ve written up most of the processes and many of the tricks on EBW’s Knowledge Base. Also listed there are several online guides/resources that I found hugely helpful: general ones and specific epub ones.

Beyond those carefully constructed resources, there was a lot of reading endless community-support forum discussions, where others had gone before and asked and answered almost any question that ever occurred to me.

If you’re willing to spend a lot of time reading and experimenting, you can learn how to do anything online. Start with Google.

Right now, for Paperight, I’ve been learning a lot about server software, PHP, Python, database structures, CSS efficiencies, server-side PDF processing, payment gateways, and more. You do have to love reading and trying stuff, even at the expense of your evenings and your bloodshot eyes.

If you make ebooks, how did you learn?