Standard Style 30 March 2015
Standard Style Magazine
Standard Style Magazine
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28 THE STANDARD STYLE / ARTS / BOOKWORM<br />
<strong>March</strong> 29 to April 4 <strong>2015</strong><br />
The story of Zimbabwe’s pioneering<br />
e-book marketplace<br />
Mazwi Store – ‘an<br />
online bookstore, where<br />
anyone can buy,<br />
distribute or share<br />
African books and<br />
magazines.’<br />
By Bookworm<br />
Three years ago I attended my first ever local<br />
hackathon organised by the British Council<br />
under the theme Culture Shift Zimbabwe. An<br />
interesting mix of young creatives and techies<br />
converged to participate in this collaborative event to<br />
come up with digital solutions to issues that creative<br />
and cultural practitioners face.<br />
Among the many young people I met there was Tafadzwa<br />
Makura. During the course of a few days, with his<br />
team, they pitched Open Book, the first online portal<br />
for selling books in Zimbabwe and it was not surprising<br />
that they won the first prize. Over the years the platform<br />
has significantly changed and received overwhelming<br />
support from local and international partners.<br />
The Open Book project is now an incorporated company<br />
that runs Mazwi Store – ‘an online bookstore, where<br />
anyone can buy, distribute or share African books and<br />
magazines.’<br />
And their mission: ‘We are simply making amazing<br />
books available to you, we are not trying to change<br />
where or how you read them. When you buy a book you<br />
can download and read it on any Adobe Digital Editions<br />
compatible reading app for your Apple, Windows or Android<br />
device.’<br />
It’s a noble initiative to support authors in the country<br />
and from elsewhere in Africa to publish and sell their<br />
work electronically at low costs. Easy to say but delicately<br />
complex. Do we have the necessary e-commerce infrastructure?<br />
Is the content available? Is the content optimised<br />
for mobile devices? And is there quality control?<br />
I have bemoaned in previous installments of Bookworm<br />
the worrisome state of our literary productions.<br />
Tafadzwa Makura and his team have to beware their<br />
platform being swamped with feel good sub-standard,<br />
badly self published books and motivational get rich<br />
quick manuals. These are the books which are currently<br />
populating the shelf space in the few bookshops in<br />
our cities. Just because everyone is writing them doesn’t<br />
make them any good.<br />
However, the legitimate question to ask is: are we<br />
ready for the e-book? It is no exaggeration that e-books<br />
are not yet popular among writers, readers and publishers<br />
in Zimbabwe. Even though many people have been<br />
using email over the years and are now engaging in daily<br />
conversations on popular social network sites such<br />
Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp fewer actually read.<br />
The exciting news that millions of people are currently<br />
using mobile phones in Zimbabwe is exciting an exciting<br />
business potential and for mass literacy campaigns,<br />
but these masses are not reading as much as they are<br />
‘talking’ on social media and many commentaries and<br />
debates lament the poor reading culture among Zimbabweans.<br />
The ubiquity of the mobile device has presented an<br />
opportunity to change all that. It is a great opportunity<br />
for local publishers not only to re-think their model but<br />
also to re-imagine the ‘book experience.’ Local publishers<br />
who have already embraced the platform are the ever<br />
forward thinking duo of amaBooks and Weaver Press.<br />
It is strange that the bigger publishing collective – College<br />
Press, Longman, Mambo Press and ZPH – still insist<br />
living in the stone age. Whether they like it or not,<br />
reading digital books on portable electronic devices is<br />
the wave of the future and unfortunately the future is<br />
now, something any of us would have predicted a few<br />
years ago.<br />
There is a general disconnect between the leadership<br />
in these companies too – old school. We have a remarkable<br />
pool of tech talent such as the one I met at the Culture<br />
Shift Zimbabwe hackathon in Harare. Young talent<br />
that is not being fully utilised but could offer disruptive<br />
solutions to some of the problems affecting the local<br />
publishing industry.<br />
The Zimbabwean book market is facing a number of<br />
challenges because of a depressed economy and low incomes,<br />
coupled with high operational costs for publishers<br />
and bookshop closures.<br />
And while the consumer book market is smaller than<br />
the educational book market, it is not surprsing to find<br />
that most course-related materials in schools and universities<br />
are photocopies simply students and teachers<br />
cannot afford books.<br />
It is easy to be optimistic of the e-book but the cost of<br />
bandwidth constraints in Zimbabwe will remain a prohibitive<br />
factor that will keep a lid of the sale of e-books<br />
resulting in penetration being lower here than in other<br />
markets. In the US, even though Amazon is a virtual<br />
marketplace it has become the ‘place to go to’ for books<br />
and other merchandise.<br />
In the interim the impact of e-books on the overall<br />
Zimbabwean market will remain limited due to a<br />
lack of proper infrastructre but the pioneering initiative<br />
of The Open Book Project is an exciting beginning.<br />
For now printed books may continue to dominate<br />
the local consumer and educational publishing market<br />
for some years, but e-books and other digital<br />
products present a new way of engaging and relating<br />
with the world.<br />
It’s a Sunday, get a book to finish off the weekend<br />
on https://shop.mazwi.co/ and support a Zimbabwean<br />
virtual bookshop.<br />
Feedback: bhukuworm@gmail.com
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