It was a huge pleasure to meet and chat to Thomas Maree and Lungile Tom from CNBA Africa last week. They were doing a short segment on Paperight after we won the TOC Startup Showcase in February. Here’s the clip.
Paperight on CNBC Africa
Reply
Tag Archives: Paperight
Disruptive innovations in emerging markets: Mxit, Siyavula, Paperight and Worldreader
At the superb publishing-technology conference Tools of Change for Publishing last week, Michael Smith of Worldreader and I presented a session called ‘Disruptive Innovations in Emerging Markets: Mxit, Siyavula, Paperight and Worldreader’. Here are my notes, and you can see Michael’s slides on Slideshare.
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. Continue reading
‘Books for Africa’: Paperight at The Owl Club
It was a huge honour to be invited to speak at The Owl Club in Cape Town on 20 November 2012. The Owl Club gathers together every month a hundred of the wisest, friendliest, most distinguished men of Cape Town for an evening of smart conversation, music, and guest speaking. This talk was titled ‘Books for Africa’.
I’m sure none of us can imagine growing up without books. And I don’t think it’s overreaching to say that without reading books, whether that’s fiction, biography, history, business, psychology or art, it is almost impossible to be a self-sufficient, clear-thinking, competitive member of society.
And yet the terrifying reality is that bookshops and libraries are vanishingly rare in most of Africa.
And when they do exist, they’re tiny and badly stocked.
So, if the stakes are so high, why do we have this problem? Continue reading
Three disruptive innovations in publishing: Fiction on Mxit, Siyavula, Paperight
At the International Publishers Congress in Cape Town today, I got to present in a session called ‘Literacy for Digital Natives’. While none of the speakers were too keen on that label, we did what we could with it. I talked about the need for disruptive innovation, and about three platforms: fiction on phones (especially Mxit), Siyavula’s open textbooks, and Paperight. Here is what I said.
As the Internet provides countless new ways for young people to find and process information, and technology-focused retail and advertising companies sweep them off their feet, as book publishers we have only a little time left as the natural custodians of books as we know them: these carefully curated packages of information and stories. Already, books have to work harder than ever to earn their place on a person’s mental bookshelf, as it gets filled with all manner of other ways to learn and explore. Continue reading
Paperight, the 60-second intro
To help explain Paperight, I’ve created a few rough videos. Here’s the shortest: my sixty-second intro to Paperight. On the Paperight YouTube channel, there are currently two others: a four-minute run through the planned UI, and a longer explanation of some of the thinking behind Paperight, and how it fits into the future of content distribution in Africa.