The state of digital publishing: facts and figures from Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria

• In Event: Building sustainable book supply chains through digital platforms: open licensing, content creation, and support for local publishers and authors

Proposal

A sustainable reading ecosystem and global improvements in literacy acquisition will never be viable without the buy-in of local stakeholders and a strong publishing market to support demand for educational materials. As the countries of modern Africa move into a new era of development, local African writing is finally receiving the attention it has long deserved. Publishers all over the continent are breaking free from colonial legacies, establishing their own voices, and providing a platform to local writers and those in diaspora. While the opportunity is great, many African publishers are still struggling to break free from textbook markets due to strict government policies that withhold funding for more varied content production and mandate high import and export taxes on paper and books. For trade publishing, there are challenges from limited reading cultures and low levels of literacy. Yet, with the help of digital tools and a globalizing world, African publishers are establishing themselves on the international publishing scene.

Starting in 2013, when the European market saw explosive growth in digital, a few local digital distribution networks in Africa began to emerge. While their presence is still limited to a handful of countries, a variety of international ebook providers have also expanded to reach African markets in the past few years. This market growth has meant that publishers across the continent now tend to be keenly interested in going digital. But what are the real benefits of doing so?

With an eye for working with publishers to create sustainable book supply chains, our organization set out in 2017 to better understand the publishing ecosystem and potential for digital in three of our partner countries: Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana. A survey was sent to 65 publishers across three countries with a range of questions that aimed to outline the digital publishing landscape, from a publisher’s production costs in print to perceived barriers and opportunities for digital growth.

When analyzing the results of the survey there were themes that existed across all three markets, like reduced production costs and shortened timelines through digital. Digital is making it cheaper and easier to create and produce content. Other themes were large educational publishers maintaining a stronghold on the market, and economies of scale for production of physical books making it prohibitive for smaller trade publishers to enter the market. However, publishers are beginning to embrace digital to strip away the need for minimal print runs, thus diversifying the types of books brought to market that would not have been possible before. Publishers across the board see the potential for digital books. All respondents identified new markets and a wider audience as the greatest reward for going digital, but publishers also identified reaching these new audiences as digital’s greatest challenge.

Authors

• Rachel Heavner, Worldreader

• Nancy Insights Brown, Worldreader