Previous versions of the site, from prototypes in 2009 to the beta we built last year, were missing key features that I believe are crucial to the ecosystem we’re trying to enable:

• Documents have to be watermarked and delivered instantly, so that copy shops can print for customers while they wait.
• Outlets have to be able to top up an account in advance.
• Outlets have to be able to work in the currency of their choice, wherever they are in the world.
• The site has to be lightning fast and easy to use.

We’ve achieved that now, and I’m really happy about it.

There’s been a team of people that have made it happen, some of whom were involved in the early stages years ago. And even though this is only the beginning of the journey, I’m going to single some of them out for special thanks, in roughly chronological order of involvement:

• Michelle Matthews, without whom nothing interesting happens in my head.
• My team at Electric Book Works, especially Sukeena Palekar, Silma Parker and Lara Aucamp, who trustingly let me spend precious resources on a non-revenue-generating side project for three years.
• Norman Hooper, co-founder and former CTO at EBW, who built early prototypes and proofs of concept, and my co-founder and CTO at trc.me, which will soon be another key feature of Paperight and a great service in its own right.
• Eve Gray, Steve Kromberg and Ruth Andrews of Creative R&D, who hooked us up with seed funding from an IDRC project in 2009.
• Dave Woods, chief editor of the EBW Healthcare series and co-founder of the Perinatal Education Trust, whose grant funding in 2010 enabled us to plan, test and build critical pieces of the technology and business-model puzzle.
• The team at the Shuttleworth Foundation – Helen, Karien, Karen, Wendy – whose support financial, logistical, emotional and social have made so much possible over the last nine months. And my fellow Fellows there, who are a constant inspiration and hard acts to follow.
• My incredible team at Paperight, Tarryn, Nick, Zimkita, Yazeed and Zukisani (in order of appearance), who’re happy to run up stairs with me. (And alumni Anna Malczyk and Michal Blaszczyk.)
• The super-sharp team at Realm Digital – Wesley, Murray, Shaine and Ellie in particular – who make web-development seem almost easy, even when it’s happening in the middle of the night.

Of course, it’s early to roll the credits, and there are many others who’ve contributed over the years. But on a milestone day, I’m thinking of you all.

The INPN is a forum for innovative publishing explicitly focused on innovative solutions and initiatives from around the world. Its founders’ great track records and passion for what they do, and a very well-attended launch, bode well for its future.

I spoke about the origins of Paperight, why it’s important, and (briefly) how it works.

We didn’t get to film the presentations so, tucked safely away from the crowds, I’ve created a slides-and-audio version of my presentation. As you know, Pecha Kucha is a presentation format that requires twenty slides for twenty seconds each; a total 6:40 to get your message across. It’s a brutal but hugely satisfying constraint.

It was a lot easier to record this in the safety of my hotel room than to present live. Presenting live to timed slides is tough. I owe a debt of gratitude to the many folk who’ve put their tips online – search ‘pecha kucha tips’ – it’s a tough art that takes a lot of planning and rehearsal prep. But try it and you’ll be hooked.

BP: First, the easy and simple question: how do you make money as a would-be author today, and how do modern-day publishers make money?

AA: It’s as hard as it ever was. That’s because to make money you have to be good at selling, and most authors are bad at selling. Or rather, they think they’re bad, so they don’t try. Many publishers are the same: they hire mediocre salespeople because they don’t believe they need or deserve or can afford great ones.

As an author, you might be selling copies of your work, or your services as a speaker or writing coach, or custom-written pieces of copy for corporations. Whatever you write, you have to sell. In Rich Dad, Poor Dad (a somewhat obnoxious but indispensable book for writers), Robert Kiyosaki tells the story of meeting a journalist who wished she could make money from her creative writing.

“Do you see this?” I said pointing to her notes. She looked down at her notes. “What?” she said, confused. Again, I pointed deliberately to her notes. On her pad she had written “Robert Kiyosaki, best-selling author.” It says “best-selling author,” not “best-writing author.”

Publishers are just the same. The process of making a book is a craft that any team of freelance professionals can do well, hence the apparent rise of self- and small-scale publishing. But the process of selling a book is a separate art and science. You have to learn to sell. Take a course. Read books on selling. Don’t feel it’s beneath you because you’re a ‘writer’.

BP: How have writers and publishers had to adapt and come to terms with the digital age and how can they make it work for them – what are the new skills and challenges they’ve had to acquire and master in order to become successful (over the certain level of talent and ability which we assume as a given)?

AA: Since so many customers are spending time online, that’s where they get most of their reading recommendations: friends on Facebook, reviews on Amazon, adverts in Google Search, blog posts, and so on. So selling has moved largely online. This means two things: you have to be able to sell online, and your customers have to be able to buy your work right there, instantly, on impulse. That may mean an ebook sale or, at the very least, availability on major print-book online retailers. My new venture Paperight lets you sell through copy-shops anywhere. Half of sales is making it really easy for people to hand over their money.

BP: How do you control copyright and deal with piracy/loss of potential revenue, and what are the costs involved with all this admin?

AA: You don’t try to ‘control’ anything, your job is to enable. If you try to control the whole selling-vs-piracy ecosystem you’ll end up spending vast amounts of time and energy chasing ghosts. As publisher Tim O’Reilly says, most people who pirate your work weren’t going to pay for it anyway – so it’s not ‘lost’ revenue. The more pirated you are, the more popular you are, great! Now, just make it so easy for people to find and buy your work through legit channels, so that they find those faster than they find pirated versions. It’s much faster to find a book on Amazon than it is to find a reliable copy on The Pirate Bay. Amazon Kindle has 80% market share in ebooks because they’re easy and fast to buy from.

BP: What are you expecting to happen in the future, with regards to income streams and the way the publishing industry is evolving?

AA: I actually think income streams will stay much the same as they’ve always been: small for authors, and channelled through large companies that publish most of the best-selling books. Increasingly, those companies might be technology companies or retailers (think Amazon, Google, Apple), and not only the Big Six publishers (Macmillan, Penguin, Hachette, HarperCollins, Random House, and Simon & Schuster).

In editorial and marketing there are very few economies of scale. This means anyone can make and market a book as well as anyone else – this should lead to a growth of smaller, niche publishing enterprises. But big companies can afford to cross-subsidise books, allowing successful books to pay for losers. There are always losers, maybe as many as 8 of 10 books lose money for publishers. So that makes it possible for them to attract top talent by making better financial promises to authors.

But while the income streams will stay much the same, the people and companies earning them will change a lot, based on who gets better at selling online: marketing, building trusting communities of customers, and making it easy to buy.

• we got our site (version-named Paperight 0.5) up and running with pilot content from EBW Healthcare
• tested and established workflows, QA tests and standard documentation
• spoke to dozens of publishers in South Africa, at the Frankfurt Book Fair and in London
• finalised our plain-language rightsholder agreement and outlet licence
• refined our pricing and publisher-revenue models
• recruited a Content Manager
• and started on UX and specs for Paperight 1.0.

In our second quarter, we’ve focused on building a viable first-stage content list, planning our marketing for the next six months, and early thrashing for the Paperight 1.0 site build.

• We added over 1000 publications to paperight.com – Tarryn’s content report on the Paperight blog includes a great analysis of the work she and Michal Blazsczyk did to make this happen
• created a high-quality poster catalogue that we give to outlets to help them advertise book-printing to outlets (check it out on the Paperight blog), complete with soap-style blurbs for the classics
• continued collaboration discussions with publishers, licensing agencies, technology companies, consumer-facing businesses with multiple outlets, and our provincial education department
• planned the 1.0 site in detail, which involved refining wireframes and UI, investigating and negotiating with software development partners, drawing up IP agreements (we’d like to GPL our code eventually, so we can’t build with proprietary tools), and workshopping and polishing a functional spec for the entire build
• planned a marketing campaign and recruited promotional staff, including marketing consultant Niki Anderson and (soon to be appointed) an outlet-relations manager
• found and planned the great new office space we’ll be in from April
• and continued to develop our internal ops manual (guides, standard docs, and reference info) in a wiki, to help new team members get up to speed quickly, and keep existing staff up-to-date.

The team’s now four people, and about to be five: myself, Tarryn-Anne Anderson (Content Manager), Nick Mulgrew (content-team intern), Niki Anderson (part-time marketing), and an outlet-relations manager we’re appointing shortly. Michal Blazscyk (content-team intern) finished his internship and is off the London, where some lucky publishing company will snap him up.

So, that’s two quarters down. We have a gameplan for each one, even if day-to-day things seem to turn on a dime. The first quarter was infrastructure and research. The second: a substantial content offering, marketing planning, and Paperight 1.0 thrashing.

For our third quarter, we’re getting out of the office with direct outlet approaches and a PR-heavy marketing campaign, and getting Paperight 1.0 built and running. 1.0 gives us key new functionality important to outlets and publishers: especially instant doc-delivery, currency conversion, and catalogues defined by territory.

The fourth quarter will also be marketing-heavy, and will include pushing commercial-publisher content that we can only sell with 1.0′s territoriality features.

Behind our efforts, the ever-supportive, midnight-oil-burning team at the Shuttleworth Foundation keeps our mental, emotional, and electrical lights on. And my fellow Fellows are an unending source of inspiration, common sense, and cryable shoulders. Cheers to them.

The debate so far seems to revolve around the ethics of these decisions: Should bookstores with immense power be limiting access to books? That’s a tricky argument. I don’t think we’ll resolve it.

While it rages on, though, we have a chance to highlight alternative ways the ebook marketplace could work. Ways that don’t rely on massive centralization of the ebook marketplace around companies like Amazon, Apple, and Adobe. Specifically, we get to talk about DRM-free ebooks, the Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS), and retail innovation.

When they insist on using DRM for almost everything, publishers create obstacles for consumers. To keep their reading lives simple, consumers will flock to the retailer with the biggest catalogue and the simplest checkout process, so that they never have to worry about DRM compatibility between ereaders. That’s how Amazon cleaned up. Charlie Stross makes a compelling argument that publishers’ insistence on DRM created Amazon’s dominance – a rod for their own backs.

The way out for publishers is to sell DRM-free books from any retailer, and from their own sites. Their books should be for sale in so many places that it’s infinitely easier to buy them than it is to find pirated versions, or to figure out which one big retailer carries them.

But how will consumers find those sites? How will they even know which publisher’s site to visit? Enter OPDS and distributed licensing.

OPDS

OPDS is a simple computer language for sharing ebook catalogues online. By putting an OPDS catalogue of their books online – with a link for each book to a buy-now page – any retailer or ereader application can find and redistribute that catalogue. This way, catalogues can spread virally among applications and platforms, pointing more and more users back to the publisher’s buy-now page. (If the publisher doesn’t want to build their own ecommerce store, they can choose to send buyers somewhere else, even to Amazon.)

OPDS is the core of the Bookserver project, which is coordinated by the Internet Archive.

Distributed licensing

Distributed licensing is my keenest interest. To grow markets internationally, publishers must rely more and more on local expertise to sell to consumers over the last mile. Local experts might be municipal school boards on the other side of the world, a remote healthcare NGO, or a keen translator in another country. These people repackage content in ways that best suit their local markets. A local expert might also be a retailer with a niche market so specific that the publisher can’t reach it or even think of it.

The rights industry is built for publishers to take advantage of licensing agreements with local experts to grow revenue in distant markets. But agreements are slow and costly to come by. With Paperight, we’re making an important licence – print-on-demand, reprographic rights – one-click easy.

I hope that before long we’ll see more businesses enabling the quick, easy sale of licences that increase access to book content, and earn publishers revenue beyond the narrow confines of the mainstream ebook marketplace. Quick, open or imaginative licensing encourages retailers to think of entirely new ways to sell book content. Our Paperight outlets are one example. I’m certain we’ll see others soon.

From the paper:

What makes some markets more attractive to leverage MFS for healthcare than others? At the crux of every initiative is a large need that drives the effort. In the case of Ghana, the private sector is seeking to meet the pent up consumer demand for life insurance, spurred by government education around insurance, by exploring new business models between insurers and mobile operators to bring mobile micro-life insurance to market.

In Haiti, the devastating earthquake spurred new initiative funds to jumpstart MFS systems in the private sector. Mobile operators with the advantage of creating new systems from scratch rose to the challenge to set up a financial infrastructure quickly, while also supporting the expanding cholera epidemic and other critical healthcare issues of the country. They have been working with health providers to drive efficiencies around registration and distribution of the products and services across both sectors by leveraging resources across sectors.

In markets where there is already significant MFS penetration and usage, such as Kenya and the Philippines, the mature MFS systems are being used to support better business models, higher quality of care, or increased access to health services. These initiatives have taken root in a variety of areas – from supporting government initiated health programs, as is the case in the Philippines, to providing alternative financial tools for those left out of public insurance, as seen in Kenya. In other markets such as Ghana and Haiti, MFS are less mature. As these systems evolve, there are opportunities to incorporate extremely innovative business models and operations.

The paper also highlights key challenges that any project leader in mobile money or mobile health should know about. Here’s the PDF.

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.)