How do we learn to engage?

The numbers say it all. Print is in decline and the time of the e-book is upon us. Every year, less printed books are being sold in ever fewer bookshops and more digital books are being paid for and delivered online to people in the comfort of their own homes. How to hold on to customers is front of mind for booksellers as publishers lead the change in adapting to digital content and selling e-books through new, more tech-savvy channels. Apple has sold 84 million iPads in just six years and 25.9 million e-readers were shipped in 2011 alone. The actual number of e-books being sold is an anomaly as the main players in the digital realm refuse to divulge their figures, but it is very clear that as print sales are dropping across almost all genres, so digital sales are on the rise.

It is perhaps not so surprising that amidst all this change, the children’s print book market has proven to be rather resilient in the first world. For example, Nielsen Bookdata shows that in a 52 week comparison to mid June 2011 vs 2012, sales of Fiction and Nonfiction in the US fell by 15.4% and 8.8% respectively, while there was a marginal decline of 0.8% in the sales of printed children’s books. In the UK, the picture is very similar, with Fiction sales falling by 16.5% and Non-fiction by 10.3% while the decline in sales of children’s print books was a mere 3.5%.

Parents obviously still believe in the benefit of reading to and with their children and up till now, the beautifully illustrated books crafted by publishers were the best medium through which to do that. How long the status quo will remain is a key question.

While publishers are still by and large coming to grips with the creation and distribution of standard text-centric e-books along with the big challenges (and regulatory scrutiny) around distribution deals and pricing, content and design are, for the moment, a little less important.

The children’s book market is, of course, all about design and with the infinite possibilities that computer programming can offer an online designer, content enhancement is the new buzz word and children’s book publishers are beginning to outdo themselves in creating the latest and greatest children’s book apps as full of interactive media and dynamic imagery as possible.

The e-books market has seen children’s publishers turn their picturebooks into apps, writes Stuart Dredge in The Guardian . He further notes: “A session at the London Book Fair’s Digital Minds conference explored the implications with panelists from publishers Macmillan, Penguin and Nosy Crow, and transmedia production firm Starlight Runner Entertainment. The key theme: making great bookapps for children is very different from making books: it’s a collaborative process requiring animators, coders, musicians and above all storytellers with a feel for interactive narrative.”

JK Rowling’s Pottermore has teamed up with Sony’s “Wonderbook” to produce the Book of Spells which is intended to bring down the barriers between books and games, using Augmented Reality and Playstation 3. This particular game changer is very interesting as Sony says this new enhanced e-book/game is an avenue to the 6–12 year old market for them, a market which up till now has been held snugly in mummy’s arms with a bed time book in hand.

But print purists warn against blurring the lines between books and videogames, suggests Alexandra Alter, writing for the Wall Street Journal . A recent study by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, which specializes in children’s education, tracked a small group of young children, and found that given the choice between reading e-books or print books, children prefer e-books. The study also found that children who read e-books retain and comprehend just as much as when they read print books. That they recalled less content from enhanced e-books than from unadorned digital versions of the same book, is something that should be noted by educational publishers.

Oceanhouse Media in the US, the company responsible for digitising the Sr. Suess books, agrees with this maxim. “We really don’t want to substantially add or delete anything that was there in the original books, some of which were printed 60 to 70 years ago. Seuss had to choose from a palette of two or three spot colours, and we leave those exactly as is: we haven’t gone in and recoloured the pages, and we don’t add a lot of animations or bells and whistles”, says
Oceanhouse president Michel Kripalani.

In the US, the longtime leader in all current digital developments in the West, sales of children’s e-books made huge strides in the first half of the year even as growth in adult Trade e-books slowed, according to the latest publishing sales numbers from the Association of American Publishers (AAP).

In developing countries such as our own, the picture is largely different. Firstly, unlike the US and the UK, the children’s print book market in South Africa was as hard hit as Fiction (16.8%) and Non-fiction (12.8%) in the Nielsen 52 week comparison at a decline of 12.6%. Traditional e-book adoption on the whole is limited to a privileged few who can afford the devices on which to read them along with the internet access through which to populate them with books. It is a strangely similar scenario to the general problem facing South Africa around generating a culture of reading.

In the survey on the habits and perceptions of reading conducted by the South African Book Development Council (SABDC) in 2006, it was found that the cost of books was one of the main barriers restricting their reading in every demographic identified. We have long debated the reasons behind this from the intricate relationships in the book value chain to the limited market, in which it operates which necessitates smaller, more expensive print runs.

Nick Mulgrew wrote an interesting piece in the Mail and Guardian in October entitled “Literacy: Once upon a time parents taught their children to read”. In it he quotes Tebogo Ditshego, founder of the social media campaign Read a Book South Africa , who rejects the notion that the lack of a widespread reading culture is economically driven.

“South Africans, for example, spent R10.4-billion on gum and chocolate in 2010. In comparison, the book industry only makes about R3.5-billion a year, so I am sure more than 1% of the population can afford to save up and buy four books a year,” he said.

“The challenge is to create a culture of reading books by educating parents about the importance of reading books to their children.”

This again is a point that has been much debated. How do you encourage this if people do not have access to reading materials? “Just as you can’t fall in love with someone you haven’t met, we can’t raise children who are readers if they do not meet books,” said activist and author Sindiwe Magona in the same article.

Millions of South Africans live in places where books are not readily available via bookshops or libraries, both of which are inequably distributed and resourced. Further exacerbating the issue is the 92% of public schools that, according to education activist group Equal Education, do not have functional libraries.

“Until the infrastructure is improved, other ways of making books available have to be explored. Increasingly, private and non-governmental organisations are showing that, when relevant and exciting literature is made accessible, differences can be made. The Nal’ibali initiative, for example, attempts to foster reading clubs and parent-child book reading through multilingual newspaper supplements. Organisations such as Yoza and the FunDza Literacy Trust address distribution deficits by serialising original short fiction for youths on Mxit. Tens of thousands of children are now reading books on their cellphones,” says Mulgrew.

Although it is clear that e-books have a role to play both in literacy and establishing a reading culture, a big stumbling block has been actually putting e-readers into the hands of children across Africa, making sure they function well (sometimes without access to electricity – enter solar powered readers) and loading them with suitably local content. One organization willing itself to achieve exactly that is Worldreader, a non-profit started by David Risher – former Amazon Retail president. They have been shipping Amazon’s single-purpose Kindle reader to schools and communities in sub- Saharan Africa with a goal of providing 1 million e-books to children in the largely English-speaking countries of Ghana, Uganda, and Kenya in the next year. As of October 2012, they’ve put over 229, 000 e-books into the hands of 1,000 children in sub-Saharan Africa.

According to the Worldreader website, “Those children now read more, read better, and are improving their communities”. They’ve also partnered with Caine Prize winners for African writing to ensure that the Kindles get loaded with relevant, localised content.

It seems likely that digital technology is making some big jumps across the digital divide, with many learning to read on e-readers, as the cost and complexity of distribution is lowered sharply.

Back on homeground, “South Africans’ appetite and aptitude for e-content is growing, and there is no reason why this could not extend to the education sector to increase access to content, aid learning in the classroom and also reduce the cost of learning materials over time,” says Gary Novitzkas, CEO of
kalahari.com. Kalahari is partnering with the PETS Foundation (Programme for
Educational Tablets in Schools) to support a research project that will introduce the most effective new technology tools into the learning experience.

This project intends to explore the educational, financial, technological and logistical viability of introducing tablets, digitized texts and related technologies into the South African school system over a period of five years. Novitzkas says: “Imagine a South Africa where learners have direct access to their new digital textbooks at the start of the school year. Dedicated devices will allow textbooks to be revised and updated at the press of a button, plus will allow interactive learning and a choice of content and language preference.”

Working with PRAESA (Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa), the PETS Foundation has introduced a pilot program that placed 350 e-Readers, donated by Kalahari, into the hands of learners around the country.

As Dr. Micheal Rice of the PETS Foundation wrote in the Mail & Guardian in July: “Today’s youth are technologically switched on. Unlike the rest of us, they have been born into a world dominated by ICT, the world wide web, computers, smart phones, iPads, Kindles, iPods, Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. This is their reality. They know no other. An education system that fails to take this into account will be missing a unique opportunity not only to give real substance to child centred education, but to equip our nation’s youth to take their rightful place in the global community.”

Nicolene Finlayson and Jessica Faircliff

Nielsen, Global Book Sales insights, PASA /SABA Conference 2012
E-books take off in education, www.it-online.co.za
Literacy: Once upon a time, parents taught their children to read, 19.10.2012, Nick Mulgrew, www.mg.co.za