Sub-Saharan Africa

I have been studying e-publishing in developing countries since 2009, when Ramy Habeeb (Egypt), Arthur Attwell (South Africa), and I set up the Digital Minds Network to informally exchange data. As digital publishers in the Global South, we didn't feel that the US and European business models fully met our needs. Then, in 2011, the International Alliance of Independent Publishers and the Prince Claus Fund asked me to do a detailed study of the digital phenomenon in Latin America, Africa, the Arab World, Russia, India and China.

PaidContent has a brief piece on world literacy program Worldreader, which has distributed over 75,000 e-books and e-readers to students in sub-Saharan Africa. (We’ve mentioned them a few times ourselves.) Worldreader is launching an application for Java-enabled feature phones that will allow them to read e-books and access web sites such as Facebook over ordinary [...]