Last night I attended Talking Heads at the Africa Centre, and it was fantastic. One participant described it like speed-dating for the mind: four twenty-minute conversations, each with three other people, each led by an expert in their area. Each table’s participants are randomly selected, so you have no idea beforehand who you’ll be speaking to. I was there as an ‘expert’ to talk about the future of books in Africa, and I called my presentation “Every book within walking distance of every home within 5 years”. I prepared notes, but only as a guide to the conversation, each of which was completely different. This is what I prepared.
Did you have books in your home as children?
Have you ever thought you couldn’t read a book on a small screen?
Would you read a book on a small screen if that was the only way you could read books at all?
I lived in a house filled with books at the burnaby real estate complex. I still remember some very clearly. And even though I didn’t read most of them, their being there every day opened my mind to the notion that the world was full of old and new ideas and stories and fields of knowledge. I can’t even begin to imagine what it must be like to not have that. So I’m passionate about being part of this enterprise:
Every book within walking distance of every home within 5 years.
(Allan, Lilongwe, Malawi by jonpayne, Flickr, CC-BY-NC-ND)
That’s some mission statement, but it’s completely possible, some would say likely. And it’s the single most important thing anyone in publishing can work towards.
The problem
To start figuring out how this is possible, let’s trace the story of a printed book:
- once laid out by the publisher, it’s printed in a large printing facility in an industrial hub of some sort.
- it’s then shipped to a warehouse, either the publisher’s own or one contracted by the publisher.
- it may now travel to a bookstore, where it sits on a shelf.
- if it gets sold, great. The customer, who has travelled to the store, will carry it back home, perhaps to schools, where it will be read.
- If it’s one of the millions of books that go unsold every year, it will be shipped back to the warehouse, where it’ll be destroyed.
By my napkin calculations and personal experience, an average book will travel over 10 000 kms in its lifetime, and have a 1 in 5 chance of never being shelved in a home or library.
That’s very expensive, not to mention environmentally destructive. It has created a wasteful industry that relies on tiny margins and the cheap labour of skilled but starry-eyed people. This is not an industry that can grow in developing countries, not when its competitors – video, music, film, TV, social networking, gaming – don’t face the same friction when distributing their products. So in developing countries that do not already have a print-book industry, we will simply never, ever see one develop.
We’re left with libraries with hours like this one in Hogsback in South Africa’s Eastern Cape:
(Hogsback Library Hours, Hogsback, SouthAfrica by valkyrie116 on Flickr, CC BY NC SA)
How are we going to get books distributed in developing countries? Well, the books that will be within walking distance of every home within five years won’t look like the books we grew up with.
Breaking down The Book
To get the job done, the first thing we have to do is get over our attachment to the particular physical form of books we’ve grown up with. Most books don’t need to be printed, bound, and beautiful. Let me explain. A book is made of four parts:
- Metadata (the information about the book on the cover and imprint page)
- Content (the words and pictures)
- Format (the way the words and pictures look and relate to each other)
- Medium (the physical form in which a human being receives the book)
The last part, the medium, is the least stable of these. If you change the medium, the book is still a book. Publishers for years have produced the same books in hardback, then paperback, then mass-market paperback, and now ebooks. The medium we can change for each person who needs the book. If you need an ebook for your Kindle, great! If you a print-out on scrappy A4 paper, fine too (it’s obviously fine for most students who photocopy readings every day).
The format is also fluid. The Kindle ebook edition of a book looks completely different to the iBooks ebook edition, yet we say it’s the same book. And many ereaders, like the Kindle, can read your ebook out aloud to you, which divorces format and content even further. And when we start talking about audiobooks, format really goes out the window. Now there aren’t even text and pictures, but voice and expression. The text of book can even be instantly translated online into another language – badly for now, but readably.
It’s still the same ‘book’.
When a book is stripped down to its barest essentials, it’s just a story encoded somehow, with a title and an author, Then it becomes really easy and cheap to transmit. It will then be turned into human-readable form at its destination, wherever and for whomever that may be.
The last mile
Once a book is easy to transmit, what we need is a financial ecosystem that incentivises people to buy and sell them. Edison didn’t just invent a light bulb, he actively developed an industry that would make light bulbs profitable to make and sell. We need a marketplace for producers and a myriad distributors, from the very large (think supermarket chains) to the very small (think solo entrepreneur with a street-side stall). This is already happening for big players like Amazon, Google, Apple, Ingram and Overdrive, but it will take another year or two for the really small distributors to join the party, as the cost of participating drops. The cost of software and licences is still too high for small players.
Without small players, most books won’t reach all the very different and far-flung places on our continent. It’s the small players who will get books over the last mile to consumers.
Think about what a small distributor actually does in any industry: a small retailer’s role is to be so close to their customers that they can customise, package and price a product perfectly for them. Sometimes for a market as small as a few hundred people.
For books, that may involve printing really cheaply (we’re betting on Paperight), or setting up ereader reading rooms, selling mobile-phone ebooks from a stall by Bluetooth, putting ereader screens or audiobooks in taxis, or translating parts of books into local dialects. These are things the big players aren’t interested in, but they are how books are going to reach everyone, everywhere, within five years.
My favourite example of a small player packaging content for a specific market is Alfred Sirleaf, who writes and updates the day’s news on his public blackboard in Monrovia, Liberia, and sells ad space around the board.
(Alfred Sirleaf, Daily Talk, Monrovia, Liberia by whiteafrican on Flickr, CC BY)
The puzzle pieces
To build this book-delivery ecosystem, we need four ingredients:
- Standard formats for metadata and files (done: HTML-based epub and mobi, PDF, ONIX, OPDS)
- Low-cost computing and connectivity (better every day, largely built around mobile phones)
- Automated licensing, including pricing based on customer and location (small but growing, e.g. Rightslink)
- A simple, two-way, international payment system built for mobile phones (like M-PESA in Kenya, and growing elsewhere)
The technology required to deliver book content is so simple that devices to catalogue, buy, transmit and display them could easily be commoditised within a couple of years. If you can get a phone these days for R150, the R100 ($15) ereader is not far off. Till then, printers, TVs, MP3 players, and public Internet kiosks will get things going.
Five predictions
In concrete terms, what will the world of books look like in five years time?
1. School books will not arrive in pallets on a truck. Learning materials of a formerly textbook kind will be available for schools on screen (see Worldreader.org) or to print out (either themselves or by printers in their own town). Publishers will earn a single licence fee based the number of students with access to their books at a given school. Traditional publishers will not push this change, it will come from government and from businesses that are not publishing companies, such as retailers and technology companies.
2. Online book catalogues will be so huge and so common that owning and selling access to a catalogue – as large distributors do today – will be a thing of the past. Remember before big search engines, websites were catalogued on sites like Yahoo! Directory and Ananzi? Book catalogues will go the same way, and with them will many of the barriers to access. BookServer (OPDS) will be a big part of this.
(From http://www.archive.org/bookserver)
3. Small distributors and retailers will be more important than ever. There will be so much stuff available online that an entire curation industry will develop: an industry of businesses whose job it is to select and promote good books to very specific markets. Curators already include companies like Google and Amazon, but more importantly, they will increasingly include tiny businesses who provide a niche curation service to a specific community. For instance, this Internet cafe in Johannesburg curates Nigerian movies for a local expat community.
(Street Scenes, Internet Cafe, Jozi, SouthAfrica by Esthr on Flickr, CC BY NC)
4. Physical bookstores in big shopping malls will still exist, but mainly as aspirational leisure destinations. Some will be mildly profitable. The vast majority of books will reach people on their phones, tablet computers and in their schools and colleges directly.
(Exclusive Books by Paul Jacobson, Flickr, CC BY NC; Rogers Instructing The Ladies, Buhugu, Uganda by BuhugoOrg on Flickr, CC BY NC SA)
5. Anyone anywhere with a computer and an internet connection will be a bookseller. There will be a financial incentive for people to licence and resell books to others, right down to the smallest player. They’ll be paid their incentives and rewards straight to their mobile phones. Affiliate programs like Amazon’s already encourage this, and it’ll become commonplace for any content business. Even in places like Buhugu, Uganda, where small stores already resell mobile-phone services.
(Bodabodas And Advertising, Buhugu, Uganda by BuhugoOrg on Flickr, CC BY NC SA)
Best of all, teenagers in places we’ve never heard of will finally be reading and writing themselves into a generation of Nobel prize winners.
(Schoolboys, Butare, Rwanda by rytc on Flickr, CC BY NC)
Those armfuls of paper? Soon those could be any publisher’s books, bought and paid for from a licenced reseller.
Every book.
Walking distance.
5 years.
Wow, very ambitious plans.
A couple questions:
1. Is this plan for all of Africa? Or just South Africa?
2. How do you address the fact that there production of African books for children is so low? Who is writing the books that these African children will be reading?
3. What age range of children’s books are you targeting? In any case, picture books will also be transmitted by the electronic format?
4. What about the fact that reading is just not popular. There is a faint-hearted reading community among young people in most African communities. What’s gonna drive the supply of this new form of books when the demand is just not strong?
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Thanks for the questions, Deborah. The answers could be long and involved, but here’s the gist (over two comments):
1. I wouldn’t call this a plan so much as a prediction. My own plan is just to be a small part of it. Either way, it’s for any developing country.
2. Children’s-book production is low because the print-book industry is unprofitable most of the time. Production and readership are chicken and egg. As we enable a marketplace for books to exist, more people will be able to justify the time and expense of writing and producing children’s books.
3. Anything can be transmitted, so my prediction does not imply any particular targeting; that’ll be done by specific publishers and last-mile resellers.
4. It’s a sad but pervasive myth that reading is not popular in a given community. It’s like saying sport is not popular among girls. The point is that the expense of print books (to make, distribute, and purchase) makes them rare. That scarcity makes worthless any assumption about a given market – there are just no meaningful numbers from which to draw conclusions. If we solve the scarcity problem, we get to draw useful conclusions from market behaviour.
So whose motto/goal is: “Every book within walking distance of every home within 5 years?” I’m not too clear on that bit.
And if you wouldn’t mind sharing what your personal plan is to work toward this goal? I’m curious as to where one would start.
My thoughts on this topic: The digital age is looming fast upon us in the developing world. In fact in Africa, it is here already and we are starting to experience its effects; technology is slowly becoming a part of our lives. Now, because the digital age will change life as we know it different sectors are predicting what their futures will look like. These predictions come with plans and preparations to be ready for the new times. The problem: sectors are not making these preparations collaboratively. For instance, publishers even in Africa, are going e-reader, e-book crazy. But are writers in Africa going as crazy or preparing to meet this demand?
I fear that 5 years down the line, you will be right and there will be a lot of media for promoting reading among the young and the old. Only thing, like deja vu, African markets will be flooded 90% by books that we are not writing ourselves. And no matter how you spin it, that is a big problem.
I wish as much attention would be paid to the quality of our content as we are paying to the media through which we will access them. E-reader, book, mobile book, audio book, whatever it is, someone has to produce its content. We need to make sure these content providers too are getting ready for the new times.