Smangele Mathebula is a Masters student at Oxford Brookes University studying trade publishing in South Africa. She’s looking for better business models that will allow trade publishers to cater to market segments they’ve traditionally not reached, particularly in Soweto. She asked for my opinion on these issues in a series of thought-provoking questions. Here’s our Q&A, which she and I hope will encourage further discussion on important issues. Continue reading
Author Archives: Arthur Attwell
Shuttleworth Foundation backs Paperight for a second year
This week my team and I got a huge boost when the Shuttleworth Foundation renewed my Fellowship for a second year, and with it the funding that fuels Paperight. The Foundation’s brave and effective funding model means that my expenses are covered for a year, and they match my investment in Paperight many times over. (This video explains how it works.) It means we can build great quality software, hire a team, run marketing campaigns, and much more.
Here’s my video pitch for the second year’s funding, which formed part of my application for it.
TEDxCapeTown: Every book within walking distance of every home
On 21 July 2012 I presented at TEDxCapeTown, an amazing day of incredible ideas and conversation. This is what I said. (See my shorter version of this talk for the TED Talent Search here. You can Recommend and Comment there, too, if you reckon I should be speaking at TED 2013.)
Update 1 October 2012: You can see the video here.
I have a question! Who here had one of these books to read when we were growing up?
That makes us really lucky, because bookshops and libraries are vanishingly rare in South Africa. Continue reading
Keeping up with the highlights
It’s a hazard that when you’re moving fast you can miss your own achievements. At Paperight, so much is happening that sometimes we forget to take a breath and enjoy the moment. In early June, I reviewed some highlights from our first nine months. And already more has happened. So before I forget to notice: Continue reading
The weakest links in schoolbook publishing
Last year, Macmillan was fined over eleven million pounds in the UK for corruption in East and West African educational publishing. Essentially, they bribed officials to get their books preferred over competitors’ books. A year later, Oxford University Press has been fined for similar practices, also in East Africa.
In South Africa today, we have a major textbook crisis in Limpopo and worrying signs of textbook meltdown in the Eastern Cape. Last year’s astonishing decision by government to approve only eight textbooks in any one subject area may have increased the temptation to pay off officials. Big publishers are reeling after government rejected several major titles for public school use. Small publishers are even bigger losers, where rejections effectively put them out of business. Legal action by one publisher in response may have serious consequences for the rollout of the new curriculum for grades 11 and 12 next year.
How broken must a business model be before we stop perpetuating it?
The problem starts with the way we’ve structured schoolbook-publishing business models. Continue reading