Exploring Pooled Procurement: How to Make Local Language Storybook Publishing Profitable for Publishers

• In Event: Best practices and innovations in children’s storybook publishing: public-private partnerships, quality translations, open licensing, and pooled procurement

Proposal

Interventions increasingly prioritize efforts to build capacity of local publishing industries. But do they focus on the barriers that truly prevent publishers from filling the storybook gap? Government and private donors want organizations to partner with local publishers to create sustainable impact that extends far beyond the life of the project. Theoretically, after an emerging publisher learns how to publish quality storybooks, they can further apply their knowledge to change the industry. However, publishers face a multitude of challenges that prevent them from doing so. Publishers are private businesses that rely on profit to survive yet demand for children’s storybooks remains low in many of their markets. Similarly, producing content in local languages oftentimes proves unprofitable. The lack of demand, and therefore profit, prevents publishers from creating storybooks. The Brookings Institute states in First Step to Literacy: Getting Books in the Hands of Children (Adams & Van Der Gaag, 2011), “In disadvantaged communities, where there are relatively few books and even fewer books in local languages and that deal with culturally-relevant topics, innovation is needed to help develop a robust culture of literacy.” Despite development efforts, many children remain without relevant storybooks in their language, leaving open the need for new ways of partnering with publishers.

This presentation draws from Room to Read’s experience in the South African publishing industry with lessons applicable to emerging publishing industries across the global south. Despite having the second largest economy in Africa, South Africa struggles to provide quality African-language storybooks for children. The country has eleven national languages, but nearly all content is in English or Afrikaans. In addition, the majority of content created for children is classroom material designed for instructional teaching rather than reading for pleasure. A lack of demand for African-language storybooks results in a lack of supply which in turn makes it difficult for a culture of reading to develop to drive up demand.

Through the REACH project, Room to Read explored sustainable methods for South African publishers to create African-language storybooks. Primarily, we explored the pooled procurement model as a potential way to make African-language books profitable for publishers in a low-demand market. Pooled procurement is a printing model in which a publisher solicits book orders before printing, rather than after. Instead of “printing on demand” with small, one-off print runs, the publisher is able to create a larger, consolidated print run which brings unit costs down. Room to Read combined the pooled procurement model with printing in multiple languages.

This presentation uses an applied research framework to discuss the potential benefits of pooled procurement for publishers in emerging markets, while sharing lessons learned for other members of the development community looking to bring more local language storybooks to children.

Author

• Florence Middleton, Room to Read