Digital Minds Network

For some time Electric Book Works has been working on their Paperight service, and they've recently started a blog to offer some insight into the process and what Paperight is about. The first post explains what Paperight is. From the post:

First, what problem are we trying to solve? In most developing countries, book stores are rare, especially in rural areas. And computing and Internet access are still not accessible enough for most people, so ebooks aren’t going to solve this problem soon. But, there are tens of thousands of photocopiers in businesses and institutions in these places. We can solve this problem by letting them print books out, and pay the publishers a rights fee to do so. Publishers have been selling print-distribution rights to businesses abroad for ages – Paperight just makes that process really easy and quick.

So, Paperight turns any copy shop into a book shop. Anyone with a computer and a printer can register as a Paperight copy shop and purchase licences to print and sell books. Publishers can add books and reach markets that conventional book distribution can’t. The publisher picks the countries they want to distribute to, and can set rights fees that decrease over time as a copy shop buys further licences.

Read the rest of the post here.

In a new post on his blog, DMN co-founder Arthur Attwell describes five key challenges, which are also opportunities, for educational publishing in emerging markets. These include the need for publishers to provide content digitally before they are completely replaced by other businesses that are moving more quickly:

… publishers need to provide content now: not for the market's sake, but for their own. Every new technology needs content, and for a long time, publishers had a headstart providing it, because they already owned most of the world's high-quality educational content. For at least ten years the inevitability of the ereading revolution has been a no-brainer, and yet many publishing companies wasted that time in uncertainty or wishful thinking. Now other players are getting better at creating their own content, and a decade's headstart is almost up. Technology companies, retailers, non-profits, governments and small startups are all producing content, and under very different business models to traditional publishing ones.

On the website of his company, Electric Book Works, there is a new, free short ebook called Embracing Digital on change and opportunity in educational publishing, focusing on publishing in emerging markets.

In this article posted in Publishing Perspectives, Octavio Kulesz shares his views on the present and the future of the Argentinean ebook market. According to Kulesz, at this time, very few people in Argentina own e-readers, and suppliers have yet to develop a formal electronic market. Success in the e-book market is most likely to come from new companies with business models that are distinct from their U.S. and European counterparts.

The Argentinean publishing sector experienced an impressive boost in the aftermath of the country’s economic crash in 2001. However, at present the industry seems unable to adequately respond to the challenge posed by the digital era. The audacity that has always characterized the local entrepreneurs is pretty much alive, but has to be unleashed. (...)

In my opinion, given that the migration of the industry won’t come from analog publishers suddenly becoming digital but from new players joining the game, what we need now is a new generation of digital publishers entering the scene and taking over. This will require a big effort from that cohort, but the attempt will be worth making, since what is at stake is no less than the vitality of the forthcoming Argentinean (e)book industry. 

The young digital generation of publishers will have to experiment with new formats and with new business models. From my point of view, there must be a viable and profitable pattern for digital publishing content, because of that unquenchable thirst for online texts that citizens have started to show. Certainly, we cannot expect replicas of the old commercial scheme to work as they used to. And I daresay that even some business models related to digital that may have proved successful in the U.S. or in Europe won’t work at all in our region, so the challenge will be twofold: disenthralling ourselves of old paradigms and also doing away with certain solutions imported from the North that as such may do little to improve the current situation.

Read the full article