Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from a serious lack of infrastructure and human resources. However, the extensive mobile phone network covering the region has enabled the emergence of new publishing actors that have made mobiles their main ally. Traditional African publishers, for their part, appear in general to be optimistic with regard to new technologies: the foundations [...]
Presentation
Technical data
Countries that make up the region: Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cape Verde, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritius, Mayotte, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Saint Tome and Principe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra [...]
Reading devices in an incipient market
The first observation a visitor might make with regard to digital publishing in sub-Saharan Africa is that it is in an entirely embryonic state. For a start, the presence of e-readers is minimal. A device like the Kindle has such limited network coverage that in February 2011, only 7 countries – South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, [...]
Between the digital and the analogue: experiences with CD ROM and print on demand
Founded in 2008, the publishing house Nouvelles Éditions Numériques Africaines (NENA) bases its business model on marketing electronic books on CD ROM. From its headquarters in Dakar, this company compiles law books in PDF format – with DRM – which it sells in Senegal and Cameroon. Each one of these books contains thousands of pages and comes [...]
African online stores
Kalahari is one of the leading online stores in Africa and sells books, CDs, cameras and other mass-market products. In its digital downloads section, inaugurated in March 2010, it offers a backlist of almost 220,000 e-books and 50 electronic magazines at various prices and in different formats,[1] by both African publishers – for example LAPA – [...]
Digital repositories
In addition to the commercial platforms, there are numerous digitization initiatives and open access publications to be found across the entire continent. Below we will present two noteworthy cases. The publishing company Human Sciences Research Council Press disseminates material on social science research in electronic format – downloadable free of charge – and printed format – at very [...]
The mobile telephone, a key actor in African digital publishing
In addition to the devices and tools mentioned so far – all still in their early stages –, there is another actor that is perhaps the real protagonist of future electronic publishing in Africa: the mobile phone. In comparison to other technologies, the penetration of cell phones in the region is extremely high, not just in cities [...]
Traditional publishing and the digital age: opportunities, challenges and proposals
Vosloo insists on the need to use the technology available and not just focus on paper books, but what happens in the case of traditional publishers? Those working in the printed book sector all agree that publishing in Africa has been facing enormous challenges for decades. According to the Cameroonian publisher François Nkeme, from the [...]
Possible trends
In spite of the enormous difficulties that exist with regard to infrastructure and human resources, digital publishing in Africa shows interesting potential. Based on the cases studied we can outline a number of future trends: The mobile phone network will continue to be fertile terrain for new experiments in book publishing or promotion, given that [...]