• Table of contents

    • [+]Preliminaries (3)
    • [+]Introduction (4)
    • [+]Latin America (13)
    • [—]Sub-Saharan Africa (9)
    • [+]Arab World (11)
    • [+]Russia (11)
    • [+]India (11)
    • [+]China (9)
    • [+]Conclusions (6)
    • [+]Appendix (1)
  • Recent comments

    • Sylvain, on the section Traditional publishing and its response to the digital world. Between danger and opportunity:
      Complétement d'accord avec Thierry, en même temps, quelle solution possède une société si ce n'est d'évoluer ? J'aime assez les systèmes d'édition actuels.
      31/05/2012
    • Testere, on the section Technical difficulties of digital publishing in Arabic: ePub and OCR:
      No need to exaggerate. There is always a work around and following is one of them. For current technology, only way to get accurate text in Arabic is either using pdf or image. With following version you can read you...
      23/03/2012
    • Liquid book : le livre au fil du ruisseau, on the section Foreword:
      (…) la dernière conférence matinale par Octavio Kulesz qui rendait compte d’une étude sur l’édition électronique dans les pays du Sud restitue il me semble la qualité et la démarches de toutes les interventions : lumineuses (…)
      18/09/2011
    • chantal, on the section Technical data:
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      03/09/2011
    • octavio, on the section Digital technology as an opportunity:
      Tout à fait d'accord! Ce sera essentiel d'aller du bas vers le haut, de l'intérieur vers l'extérieur, si le but est de stimuler des "écosystèmes" numériques locaux durables et solides.
      31/08/2011
    • thierry quinqueton, on the section Mobile phones:
      Petite contribution aux difficultés de la communication électronique avec la diversité culturelle : mon e-reader sony bugue sur les ideogrammes chinois contenus dans les notes du texte quand je lis au format EPUB (mais tout est ok dans l'étude en...
      27/08/2011
    • thierry quinqueton, on the section Mobile phones:
      Le témoignage et la présentation de Qian Fucheng est une nouvelle source de réflexion sur l'apparition de nouvelles formes d'écritures et de nouvelles modalités d'édition.
      27/08/2011
    • thierry quinqueton, on the section The new giants of online transactions:
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      27/08/2011

Presentation

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 [...]

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 [...]