Author Archives: Arthur Attwell

Why I’m pushing paper

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After five years running EBW, an ebook consultancy, I’m often asked: why am I investing my time in Paperight, a business focused on printing out books on photocopiers? Surely mobile Internet – and ebooks generally – are making paper reading redundant?

Sure they are, for people with web-capable phones, reliable electricity, and the money for data. Where there really is 3G coverage. Who aren’t trying to learn architecture or mechanical engineering on a 3-inch screen.

It’s possible, even likely, that that will never be everyone. Continue reading →

Getting Africa’s ebook horse in front of its cart

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A little part of me dies when I hear publishers say there’s no rush to make ebooks in Africa, ‘because the market isn’t ready’. I hear it often in one form or another, most recently in a piece by Tolu Ogunlesi titled “‘A book in every hand’: Digital book publishing in Africa”:

And then there’s a strategic caution at work. “I don’t want to do e-books for the sake of ebooks,” Bakare-Yusuf says, adding that it’s important to think well about digital strategy (pricing, “access” and marketing) especially in a developing market like Nigeria’s. It is important, she says, to ask and answer the question: “Why should [African consumers] buy an e-book and not a print copy.” Continue reading →

Three disruptive innovations in publishing: Fiction on Mxit, Siyavula, Paperight

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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 →

My Shuttleworth Foundation Fellowship: nine months in

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Every three months, I sum up what I’ve been doing during my Shuttleworth Foundation Fellowship. At the time of writing this, I’m also reapplying for another year as a Fellow, so this report is more thorough than usual. In particular, I wanted to talk about lessons I’ve learned, what we’ve built over the last nine months, and where we’re headed. Continue reading →

Paperight 1.0: The world’s first instant-delivery rights marketplace for copy shops

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Paperight screenshot 20120510After years of planning and prototyping, and months of hard development work, the Paperight site I’ve always wanted is finally live – see http://paperight.com. There are still a ton of features and refinements in development, but we have here the world’s first instant-delivery print-rights marketplace for copy shops.

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. Continue reading →