This is a talk about Book Dash that I gave recently about at the World Library and Information Congress in Cape Town. I originally gave it in an earlier form at Rotary Newlands.

So, I like to imagine that I’m a pharmaceutical rep, and I’m selling a drug that’s been proven to dramatically enhance brain development in young children. It’s been proven to be safe, and it’s easy and quick to administer – in fact, children love it so much they ask for it.

Till now, only wealthy families have been able to afford the drug: till now, it cost about R6 per day, which is over R10000 by the age of five. But – now! – we’ve found a way to reduce that cost tenfold: to less than 56 cents a day (that’s USD0.05). And we reckon it’s time that, as a country, we started giving it to poor families to give their kids a boost.

That drug, of course, is a book. And we’ve found a way that just 56 cents a day can buy a child a hundred books by the age of five.¹

That’s also our vision at my non-profit, Book Dash – what we want for the world: that every child should own a hundred books by the age of five.

The books in my slides (more here) were produced by teams of professional writers, illustrators and designers, volunteering their time to create new children’s books that anyone, anywhere, is free to download and adapt, translate, print, republish, sell or give away.

When you print 5000 copies or more of a book, it costs less than R10 a book. At that price, a child can have a hundred books in five years for 56 cents day.

I’ll explain how we’re making that possible, and why it’s important and special.

But, first, why do I think it’s necessary to create and give away free, paper books? Surely the publishing industry is growing the market? Surely technology is solving our problems?

I’m a book publisher, and I worked in big educational publishing companies for many years. And I happen to have an especially strong love–hate relationship with technology. I’m a keen technologist, I live and breathe technology, and yet I think technology is our age’s greatest distraction to real progress, and our biggest money waster.

Back in 2006 I left my corporate publishing job, sold my little red sports car, and struck out with some friends to start Electric Book Works, a small agency where I wanted to reimagine publishing for emerging markets, using technology sensibly and humbly.

In South Africa, our environment is so very different from the places we inherited our publishing industry from, the UK and the US in particular. We inherited royalty schemes and bookshop relationships and price points and technologies and job descriptions. But our languages, our histories, our physical spaces, our ambitions and our daily lives are different.

So the book publishing industry, as it stands, doesn’t really work here. And by ‘really work’ I mean it has not and cannot make books a part of everyone’s lives.

Over the years I’ve tried dozens of experiments to tackle this problem: I’ve published ebooks with musical soundtracks (they didn’t catch on), a self-publishing service, a youth magazine. My biggest recent project was Paperight, where I was funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation to turn copy shops into print-on-demand bookstores. And my longest-running project is Bettercare, which creates learning programmes for nurses that anyone can use online for free.

The point is to keep trying something else, anything that isn’t the usual way of doing things, because the usual way has left our country with very few, very expensive books.

After all my experimenting, I’ve come to believe that there are no ‘market solutions’ to growing a book-loving nation. For most South Africans, books are a luxury they can’t afford, not when food and clothing is already hard to come by.

Recent research from UCT’s Unilever Institute showed that most families in South Africa live on less than R6000 a month. They regularly turn off the fridge before the end of the month – they’re out of electricity, and there’s no food in it anyway. Many of them skip meals towards the end of the month. It’s mad to think they’ll ever be able to buy books, at any price.

The only way to grow readers is the hard way: we simply must give away vast numbers of free books to young children.

And this isn’t some idealistic third-world charity idea. In the UK, for eight years already, every school-going child has been given free books on World Book Day. Why do our children deserve any less?

I’m not the only one who wants to give away free books: many great non-profits are trying to do the same. The Shine Centre is a shining example. But they have to buy expensive books from publishers to do it, and there are very, very few books available that are:

• new, high-quality stories created here
• with scenes and characters our children recognise
• in languages they speak
• beautiful enough to love for a lifetime.

Who here has recently tried to buy a good, local children’s book in a bookstore? A friend recently tried to buy a book by renowned local author–illustrator Niki Daly, and found that many of his books are out of print in South Africa, even some that are still in print abroad.

Why are books like this so rare and expensive? Well, traditional publishing is an expensive process.

When you pay, say, R100 for a book in a bookstore, you’re paying for writing, development, editing, design, proofreading, the to-and-fro of disks and paper, project management, marketing, sales, printing, ebook conversion, shipping, warehousing, wastage, the retailer’s cut, returns of unsold books, the publisher’s profit, and VAT. And in between each of those pieces there is a lot of expensive time wasting.

Are there authors here? Publishers and editors? I’m sure you’re familiar with this.

This process is expensive, requires rare professional skills, and takes a long time. The average book-production process, after writing is complete, is about six months.

It’s also hugely competitive, especially in children’s books. This all makes publishing very risky. It’s almost impossible to make back your investment as a South African children’s book publisher, especially when you’re up against imported books that were created in London or New York and shipped all over the world in massive quantities.

Most children’s books published in South Africa are effectively cross-subsidised by textbook sales to government schools.

This is why there are so few South African children’s books. And why so few are in African languages.

In 2013, the latest year we have stats for, of R312 million in local trade publishing revenue, only R1.7 million, or 0.5%, came from books in our nine official African languages.

But here’s an interesting thing about the cost of book publishing: book publishing is 90% air and wages.

What I mean is that if you were to squeeze it like a sponge, removing all the air and wages, you could still make beautiful books, but for a fraction of the cost, in a fraction of the time. The trick is knowing how and what to squeeze.

About a year ago, I began working on that. We started asking professional writers, illustrators, designers and editors to volunteer their time to create new, high-quality, African children’s books. Working in teams for twelve straight hours at a time, they started making books together.

Here’s a clip from a book-creation day last year, to give you an idea of what it’s like.

Each team has a writer, an illustrator, and a designer, and twelve hours to create one book. Usually the writers have developed the idea for their story in advance, and the illustrators have thrown together some concept sketches. Expert editors then work with each group to help refine their story. We also bring in art directors and tech support, in a great venue, with great food and lots of coffee.

The room buzzes with creative energy and inspiration.

Has anyone here run the Comrades before? We call this the Comrades Marathon of creativity: not just for the long, hard day, but for the incredible solidarity it produces.

Before our first Book Dash, I’ll admit, I was really worried about the quality of the books we’d get. But what we found was astonishing: the books are just so good, and so beautiful. Committed volunteers really bring their best, because they know this is a rare chance to do something special.

Also, real-time teamwork knits the writing, illustration and design together powerfully – something that’s almost impossible in lengthy, traditional publishing workflows. One of our volunteer editors, who works by day for big publishing companies, said that this is how all children’s books should be created: with the creators sitting around a table together thrashing out every spread.

Most importantly, all our work is our gift to the world: everything is open-licensed on the day so that anyone afterwards can download, translate, print, and distribute it.

Already our books are being reused in print and digital forms around South Africa and beyond. Nal’ibali, the national reading campaign, has reused and translated our books in their newspaper story supplements, and they contribute those translations back to us. The African Storybook Project (who’ve sponsored two Book Dashes before) has republished and translated them for use online in several African countries. And we’re working with FunDza and Worldreader to put them on mobile phones here and around the world.

We’ve used crowdfunding, partnerships and corporate sponsorship to print and give away over ten thousand books in our first year, which is a small but promising start. They’ve gone to children and libraries in literacy programs, ECD projects, schools and daycare centres.

Whenever we do a give-away, we go and meet some of the children and give them books in person. And there’s nothing more wonderful for me, as a book publisher, especially one who’s buried behind a computer most days, than to give a book to a three-year-old and see them dash to a corner, open it up and start reading.

After all my experimenting, that’s the result I’ve been looking for.

Thank you.

Notes

1. 100 books over 5 years is 20 books per year, or 1.67 books per month. At R10 a book that’s R16.70 per month, or 56c per day.