Arthur Attwell

Geekrebel posted a very exciting press release today, accouncing a joint venture between Vodacom and Nedbank to bring the M-PESA mobile money solution, hugely successful in Kenya and Afghanistan, to South Africa. M-PESA allows anyone with a cellphone to transfer money without a credit card or bank account. In Kenya, it has become commonplace to accept M-PESA payments for products from groceries to flights, and has greatly increased safety for people who now no longer need to travel with cash. As a payment method, M-PESA could allow online retailers to sell to markets that till now have not been accessible because they have not had credit cards.

This morning at Tools of Change, I gave this presentation. In short, I argue that in order to sell content into Africa, publishers can't rely on print distribution, or even ebook distribution as we know it. They are going to need to let people on the ground repackage and distribute their content in unpredictable ways.

On Friday the New York Times published a nice story about The Atlantic magazine publishing short stories to the Kindle. Citing Amazon's Russ Grandinetti, the story says this is "the first deal with a magazine publisher to select short stories for sale." The Atlantic stopped publishing monthly fiction in 2005, and now publishes print fiction only once a year – the Kindle stories will come out at about two a month. The deal is exclusive: these stories will (for now) only be available on the Kindle.

On the face of it, this is a story about the Kindle, how Edna O'Brien is acquainting herself "with all that’s modern out there", and how the device may breathe new life into the short-story market, which has never been a lucrative one generally, by initiating the "iTunes-ization of short fiction".

I've been hearing a lot of confusion between print-on-demand (POD) and short-run digital printing recently. So I've been working on short, in-a-nutshell ways to describe print-on-demand as a business process, which is quite distinct from short-run printing as the technology that makes the business process possible. Here are four slides that try to capture what I think are the most important points. If they make sense as is, without captions, great! If they need captions and context, then I've got more work to do to make them clearer.

At TOC Frankfurt recently, I presented a brief outline of our Paperight project, which is in development. Essentially, Paperight aims to turn any copy shop (or print department) into an on-demand bookshop, by letting users buy the right to print a book out. At TOCF I met Christiane Schulzki-Haddouti, who's put together an interview with me about Paperight, and has captured its features nicely. I particularly appreciate how she made sure I emphasised the social-impact side of Paperight:

Is Paperight a non-profit project?
No, Paperight is a business — we call it a social enterprise with a triple bottom line: financial, social, and environmental. We measure our success in these three ways, not only in financial profit. In addition to being profitable financially, we must make a social impact by increasing access to information, and an environmental impact by reducing the carbon footprint of shipping printed books. We must keep these three bottom lines in balance.

Read the interview on Kooptech here. Christiane has also published an edited German translation on Futurezone.

Tomorrow the first C&binet forum will start a conversation around issues important to the creative economy. In particular, there will be a lot of discussion around making money from the arts in a digital world. The Internet has broken business models that were based on selling copies – books, CDs, DVDs, newspapers – and this is scary. After all, for many of us, our jobs are on the line. My field, book publishing, has come a little late to this party, and we're still taking it all in.

Do you earn a salary? Salaries are like love and hot water. You only miss them when they’re missing. This is a little shout-out to all you salaried folk, especially those who have anything, anything at all to do with making payments to small businesses and freelancers: pay up on time. I don’t mean write a cheque on day thirty, or make a bank transfer on day thirty-two – I mean get the money cleared in their accounts by the due date. To those with a steady monthly salary, this seems such a bureaucratic little detail, but for a small business it translates directly and instantly into supplies, food and homeloan payments. And every day counts.

For many of us small-business owners, marketing is the hardest part of the job. At EBW, we've learned the hard way that none of our four members are much good at it. We've taken to hiring freelance publicists project by project, which is fine, though we're yet to generate the kind of social epidemic we dream about.

So we're spending a lot of time checking out other businesses' marketing campaigns and trying to learn from them. And I've thought that perhaps we should try being offensive. Offense just looks so marvellously easy.

Like many book lovers, I was excited to see the second issue of the new magazine The Afropolitan dedicated to literary criticism. I opened it up eagerly, and flipped to an article by debut author Zukiswa Wanner about the Cape Town Book Fair. These days, I get tingles when I see anything vaguely book-related, because, for the last year and a half, I’ve been working on a rather large literary project of my own: starting a publishing company from scratch.

For at least five years I've intended to start a publishing company, and over the last six months, together with three friends, it's happened as suddenly and as marvellously as a highveld thunderstorm. In about four weeks Electric Book Works will publish its first book: uTshepo Mde: Tall Enough.

Publishers are desperate, tooth-grindingly, gut-suckingly desperate for really good editors. They do exist, all five of them, but we have a lot of books to publish.