Kenyan Book Company Brings Online Sales to East Africa

The Internet has revolutionized retail sales in many developed countries – and nowhere more so than for booksellers. The ability to offer an almost unlimited supply of books through a website is revolutionizing the way people shop and giving life to books long out of print or by unknown authors.

Kenya has recently gained a reputation for doing things differently in Africa and making great strides when it comes to using information technologies. And the next development in this story is the launch of a Kenyan online book shop modelled on the successful U.S. online bookseller Amazon (amazon.com).

A book boom is well underway across the global South. Literary festivals continue to expand, from Colombia in South America to India to Nigeria in West Africa, and so do sales of books, newspapers and magazines. While the publishing industries in developed countries despair at the impact of digital media on their profits, in the global South, rising prosperity and literacy are fuelling greater interest in reading and a growing print publishing industry. For example, India is experiencing 15-per-cent-a-year growth for its publishing industry, which is valued at nearly US $2 billion (Frankfurt Book Fair).

Kenya’s Text Book Centre (TCB) (textbookcentre.com), considered one of the country’s most reputable booksellers, has launched its own online book selling portal and its “eBook web store”. It is targeting readers across East Africa and sells books in 14 categories. Being Kenyan, it is taking an innovative approach that recognizes the large numbers of people who are doing all their transactions over mobile phones. The book portal allows customers to make purchases with their mobile phones using mobile money. This system uses the Kopo Kopo (kopokopo.com) software platform, which allows small and medium sized businesses to accept mobile phone payments.

Kopo Kopo was first developed in Sierra Leone in 2011, before being further prototyped in Kenya. Kopo Kopo wanted to develop an effective mobile platform to help small and medium sized businesses to better interact with their customers. The Kopo Kopo service was officially launched in February 2012 and is partnered with Safaricom, using its M-PESA Buy Goods service. It is being currently used by hundreds of businesses, from “salons to restaurants to office supply stores”, according to Kopo Kopo’s website.

As an added benefit, the Kenyan online book platform is joined by a new marketplace for thousands of African ebooks. This part of the service is called eKitabu (ekitabu.com).

EKitabu will be a big boost to the continent’s authors and also open up new opportunities for budding authors who previously would have struggled to get published and distribute their work. If the ebook web store follows the dynamic of online booksellers in more developed markets, then this ability to gain exposure for author’s work and find an audience could also attract bigger publishers and spark interest in international book deals for formerly obscure writers.

The Text Book Centre was founded in 1964 by two Indian business partners in Kenya, Mr. SV Shah and Mr. MJ Rughani, and is now considered the leading bookstore in Kenya, specializing in leisure and educational books, according to its website.

Headquartered in Nairobi’s central business district, it focuses on providing books for the educational sector and strives to be “East Africa’s leading leisure and educational bookstore and office support resource centre”. It also supplies to customers in Uganda, Sudan, Somalia, Malawi, Zanzibar and Tanzania.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: March 2013

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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Book Boom Rides Growing Economies and Cities

Along with growing economies, the global South is seeing growing numbers of readers and a newly flourishing publishing industry. The creative economy – of which book publishing is part – is experiencing a jolt from a combination of expanding economies and urbanizing cities. Just as the first settled cities of ancient Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq) spawned literature and learning, so the rapidly urbanizing South is changing dynamics and creating the space and demand for books.

The creative economy is seen as the “interface between creativity, culture, economics and technology in a contemporary world dominated by images, sounds, texts and symbols” (UNCTAD). It has been shown to be an effective way for emerging economies to leapfrog into high-growth areas in the 21st century world economy.

Telling stories about local conditions and people’s rapidly changing lives is proving a commercial success formula. Fast-growing India is forecast to become the largest market for English language books within a decade. India’s economic boom, which saw 6.7 percent growth in 2009, and its expanding middle class are driving demand for books. India saw the number of literate people pass 66 percent by 2007.

“It is a forward-looking generation,” said Manish Singh, country manager for publisher Harlequin Mills and Boon, to The Guardian newspaper.

Estimates of India’s book reading market put the number of readers at just 5 million out of a population of over 1 billion people. But according to Anantha Padmanabhan, the director of sales in India for publisher Penguin, “that is set to increase dramatically.”

A survey by Tehelka (http://www.tehelka.com) found Indians are favouring stories about local conditions and set in the places where they live.

India’s most popular current writer is Chetan Bhagat, a former investment banker. He has sold more than 3 million books in the last five years. His latest, Two States, sold a million copies in four months.

Bhagat writes about the country’s aspiring middle class. His publisher, Rupa (http://www.rupapublications.com/Client/home.aspx), believes he appeals to a “pan-Indian, pan-age group.”

Bhagat puts his success down to the way the stories are written. “This is not like the mature English literature market,” he said. “It needs an English that is highly accessible, simple, and with stories that are still interesting and relevant.”

Book prices in India have stayed affordable for the middle classes. A book can cost from US $1.85 to US $2.65 for a paperback – still a high cost for the poor, however, who live on a dollar a day.

In Egypt, around 30 percent of the population is illiterate and book reading has been historically very low: it has been claimed an average literate Egyptian reads a quarter of a page of a novel per year. From this low base, a best seller only needs to sell a few thousand copies.

However, in Egypt small-scale independent publishers are starting to make an impact. Mohamed Hashem – founder of the Dar Merit publishing house (http://www.zoominfo.com/Search/ReferencesView.aspx?PersonID=1007104230) – has built from scratch in 12 years one of the country’s most critically acclaimed publishers: all from a tiny apartment in a rundown Cairo building.

“We can’t compete with the big firms in terms of profits,” he told The Guardian, “but the new wave of authors will always be sitting here. Yes, we have poverty and limited resources. But we also have the future.”

Launched to counter what Hashem felt was an unimaginative book market, his stable of authors have shaken up the Arabic fiction world. The global success of Alaa al-Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yacoubian_Building) is proof Hashem’s gamble on edgy talent was correct: rejected by two government-run publishing houses, the book went on to be a hit in English and Arabic and has been made into a film.

Hashem is being credited with unleashing a wave of new talented authors that has pushed literature out from being the preserve of a select group.

One of its successful authors, Hamdi Abu Golayyel – winner of the country’s top literary prize, the Naquib Mahfouz medal – believes “Merit has changed the way pioneering literature emerges in Egypt.”

“Before, you had the innovative writers – there are normally no more than five or six in a generation – meeting together in mutual isolation, because popular opinion rejected them.”

Merit “had the drive and ambition to support and distribute new and younger authors properly. Today innovative writing is wanted by the people.”

Hashem’s secret in attracting talented writers has been more than just business savvy: he also gives them “the freedom to write in my own way,” according to writer Ahmed Alaidy.

The writers also have a credibility advantage: they are writing about their circumstances rather than just imagining what it would be like. Writer Hani Abdel Mourid comes from Cairo’s traditional garbage-collecting neighbourhood; another author, Mohamed Salah Al Azab, has written a book named after the folding seats on Egypt’s lively minibuses.

Demographic changes and Cairo’s relentless expansion are being cited as the catalyst for the new writing.

“The fact that the city has grown the way it has,” says Samia Mehrez, a literature professor in Cairo, “the fact that what we used to call the periphery is now the centre, that is very important.”

“The year we started, we published five titles and the number of people interested could be counted in the dozens,” he told The Guardian. “Now we have 600 titles under our belt, and thousands are interested. It’s my duty to try and expand that circle. We’re chipping away at a wall, and slowly we’re making progress.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: May 2010

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

Follow @SouthSouth1

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