Category: About Paperight

Wrapping up the Paperight journey

Six years ago, I began work on an experiment: if there are copy shops in every corner of the world, what if they could legally, easily print out books for their customers? We could put every book within walking distance of every home.

I still believe in that idea, but I’m sad that we couldn’t make it viable at scale. This month, we’re closing Paperight. Our particular implementation hasn’t worked out: we just couldn’t sell enough books to keep our doors open.

There are many reasons for that, some we’ll never fully understand. In the months to come I’ll be writing and talking openly about the lessons we learned, in the hope that others will keep working on distributed print-on-demand. We’ve kept an open archive of our team’s plans and discoveries, as our team’s internal story. And if you’d like to run your own Paperight-like website, the code’s all open on GitHub.

Some housekeeping: we’ve begun contacting partner outlets and publishers to finalise accounts. If you want to check in, mail team@paperight.com. The paperight.com service will work till the end of December 2014.

Many people joined me on this journey, and I couldn’t be more grateful to them. In particular, my team at Paperight, the magicians at Realm Digital, the champions who funded our early pilots, my endlessly patient and supportive wife Michelle, and the incredible individuals at the Shuttleworth Foundation, whose generosity opened the road.

I remain dedicated to reimagining publishing for emerging markets. I’ll be focusing on Bettercare, my open-access healthcare publishing, and nurturing the Book Dash children’s book initiative. And my former team are finding new homes in innovative ventures around South Africa and beyond. We’ll bring to them everything we learned at Paperight.

Keep in touch: there is still much we can all do to put every book within walking distance of every home.

One last time, then:

Instant photocopy-licensing: an important step for publishing

This week, we’re adding a new service to Paperight: we want to make it really fast and easy for anyone to make a legal photocopy of a book.

Why is that important?

Every single day, in thousands of institutions worldwide, teachers and students photocopy books. Ask almost any author or publisher, and they’ll tell you it’s terrible, and that photocopying is illegal and shouldn’t happen.

But still it does. All the time. Why?

Photocopying is easier, faster and cheaper than almost any other way to get a book.

Photocopying is easier, faster and cheaper than almost any other way to get a book. It’s easier, faster and cheaper than buying online, phoning or visiting bookstores, and waiting for delivery. Have you ever tried to buy a copy of a slightly obscure book? Or been the last student to get to the campus bookstore? Then you know that the books you need are often nowhere to be found.

Aren’t ebooks supposed to fix this? If you factor in the overheads of ereading (device, data, electricity, credit card), photocopying can even be easier, faster and cheaper than ebooks – and that’s assuming the book you need is available as an ebook in the first place, and that you’d be happy to study from a screen.

The photocopier may be the single biggest distribution mechanism in the world of books.

The photocopier may be the single biggest distribution mechanism in the world of books. It’s almost certainly the most widespread. Photocopying is not going to go away. It’s a big, old elephant in the room.

Collecting agencies

‘So, what if I really want to stay legal,’ I hear you ask, ‘or I really want to pay the author for their work – can’t I just pay someone a fee and make a legal photocopy?’

Sure. But you have to track down its rights manager and ask for permission first. That might take a few days or weeks. At which point they’ll ask you what you’re going to use the copy for. Then they’ll put you in a pre-defined category, tell you how much to pay and send you a contract to sign. So, basically, it’ll take you an indefinite amount of time and effort to pay an unknown amount of money. That’s if anyone replies to your mail.

Right now, many publishers choose not think about this, because it gives them a headache. If you ask a publisher, many will tell you they already have a plan to make legal photocopying possible: collecting agencies. A collecting agency is an organisation that collects licence fees from people making photocopies. They collect the fees then pay them on to publishers (keeping a reasonable commission). In South Africa, our collecting agency is DALRO.

Collecting agencies are ingenious, and run by lovely people. The problem is, collecting agencies have some big problems.

There is almost zero diversity in the way that copying licences are sold. As a result, there is almost zero innovation, and no competition.

Firstly, they are a monopoly. Most countries have only one collecting agency for books (there are others for creative works like music), and most of those collaborate under the IFFRO banner. The intention is to make things easy: copiers and publishers can all use the same service. The problem is that this has resulted in a licensing monoculture. There is almost zero diversity in the way that copying licences are sold. As a result, there is almost zero innovation, and no competition.

Second, working with them is full of delays: admin, correspondence, contracts, and a fair amount of legalese that slows you down. Almost nothing is instant – and we live in a world of automation where we expect transactions to be instant. These days, by the time we know we need a book, we’re out of time to find it. We need it now. And so the photocopy room is our friend.

Let’s say you know you’re going to be doing a lot of photocopying. You can have an ongoing agreement with DALRO, where every few months you send them a list of everything you’ve photocopied, and they bill you. That’s called a ‘blanket licence’. It involves a long, complicated legal contract and ongoing billing and reporting requirements. It’s not for the faint-hearted. Only big institutions like large universities are really set up to handle it. And then the university has to have lots of internal rules and processes for making sure everyone uses the system correctly. (Anecdotally, we’ve been told that lecturers at local universities often don’t follow these processes when they prescribe photocopied readings.)

On the other hand, let’s say you just want to make one or two photocopies, and your institution doesn’t have a blanket licence. Maybe you’re a teacher at a primary school, and you want to make twenty quick copies of a novella for your grade sevens. You need a ‘transactional licence’: once-off photocopying permission. For that, you have to contact DALRO each time you want to photocopy, and wait for an email back.

…they’ll only give you permission to copy up to 10 per cent of the book

Oh, and there’s this: they’ll only give you permission to copy up to 10 per cent of the book. As DALRO’s website explains, ‘DALRO may not allow the reproduction of whole books, either by a transactional licence or under a blanket licence. It’s unlawful to reproduce a whole book instead of buying it.’  You really need to copy more of the book? Elsewhere on their site, they elaborate: ‘If the book was published by a local publisher, DALRO will contact the publisher and request a licence for the larger portion. If the book was published by a foreign publisher, DALRO cannot process it but puts the licensee in touch with the foreign rights holder.’ That’ll take a while. The 10 per cent restriction is a real pain.

Complicated

Almost no one knows all this. It’s complicated stuff made worse by its grey areas. Look around online and you’ll struggle to find anything really clear about copyright and photocopying.

For instance, this common FAQ: ‘Am I allowed to photocopy part of a book for my own personal and private use? Copyright [in South Africa] is not infringed by any fair dealing with a literary work for the purposes of the personal or private use of the work by the person making the copy.  What is “fair” in any given situation will always depend on the circumstances of that situation.’

Is it fair that I can’t complete my studies because I can’t find or afford the textbook I’m prescribed?

So who decides about my circumstances? Is it fair that I can’t complete my studies because I can’t find or afford the textbook I’m prescribed? Depends what you mean by ‘fair’. ‘Fair dealing’ is actually a technical legal term whose uncertain meaning differs from country to country, and which laypeople can’t be expected to understand.

Grey areas attract legalese, because no one can really explain in plain language what’s going on. And if something can’t be made plain to laypeople, it will be ignored as if it were never there. If publishers want people to care about copyright, they’ve got to simplify the way people encounter it.

Easy, fast and cheap

Publishers could grasp the massive opportunity that photocopying represents: a huge book-distribution industry that should be generating revenue from licence fees, but doesn’t because licensing is absurdly complicated and slow.

…school teachers, college lecturers, librarians, church secretaries, HR managers, government officials. They and their institutions are legally exposed

I’m not talking about students queuing at the local copy shop, they’re not going to start paying licence fees any time soon (there are other ways to tackle that issue). I’m talking about the people who work at institutions: school teachers, college lecturers, librarians, church secretaries, HR managers, government officials. They and their institutions are legally exposed, and don’t want to get into trouble for breaking the law. Many of them would really like to do the right thing.

The only way forward is to make it easy, fast and cheap for them to make a legal photocopy of an entire book. ‘Fast’ as in ‘instant’ by today’s standards. ‘Easy’ as in:

  • I can be anyone
  • I open a website
  • I pay a fee by card or EFT
  • I print a licence to keep with my photocopy.

If it can’t be done in five minutes, then it’s not fast and it’s not easy.

Paperight and beyond

That’s what we’ve built: buying a once-off photocopy licence on paperight.com is genuinely fast and easy.

We don’t have many books listed yet: that will be up to publishers. We’re talking to them, and we hope they’ll list their books with us very soon. It’s simple for them to do, and takes almost no effort. (Existing contracts with authors allow reprographic rights deals – the same ones they make with DALRO – and collecting agencies don’t require exclusivity.) It’s also the best way to give out-of-print books a new lease on life, especially at colleges and universities that want to prescribe them.

So is this really just a long pitch for your business? Yes and no. I’d love for everyone to use Paperight for photocopy licensing (and for print-on-demand, our original service).

Competition would raise the bar. And to prove we’re serious, we’ve made the entire paperight.com website engine open-source.

But I’d love even more to have competitors offering the same thing. Competition would raise the bar. And to prove we’re serious, we’ve made the entire paperight.com website engine open-source. That means that if anyone else wants to run their own version of paperight.com under their own brand name, they can go ahead. (Grab the code here. It doesn’t include the books we list, we’re not allowed to share those.) And for anyone who wants to bring Paperight to their country, we’ll split revenue equally, so that we can grow this initiative together.

Updating our publisher and outlet agreements

UPDATE, 21 August 2014: Read more here about why we’re making these changes.

In a short while, we’ll be rolling out a major new addition to our service: the ability to get a licence to make a legal photocopy of a book. We’ll say lots more later about why that’s a huge step for publishing.

For now, we’re updating our standard agreements with publishers and outlets to accommodate the new service. Importantly: if you don’t actually use our photocopy-licensing service, nothing changes for you. The updates to the agreement only add some wording to cover the use of the new service. But of course we hope you will use it.

I’ll explain in detail what exactly we’ve changed in each agreement. I’ll quote the paragraphs we’ve changed, strikeout words we’ve removed, and put new wording in bold.

Outlet agreement

Our first update is to the opening section where we describe how Paperight works:

Paperight acts as an agent between publishers and outlets. Its website paperight.com creates instant printing and photocopying licences between publishers (or rightsholders of other kinds) and outlets, which are printing businesses and other organisations such as copy shops.
As an outlet user (e.g. a member of staff at a copy shop), when a customer asks you for a book from Paperight:

  1. find the book on paperight.com
  2. fill in the customer’s details and what you’ll charge them in addition to our licence and service fee
  3. click ‘buy now’ to get your licence
  4. click ‘download’ to download the PDF or photocopying licence and print it out
  5. for photocopying licences, stamp and sign the licence page and bind it with the photocopy
  6. delete the PDF from your computer to prevent unauthorised distribution.

This is pretty obvious: we’ve added references to photocopy licensing.

Because we expect photocopy-licensing to be used mostly by schools and colleges, we’ve broadened the description of outlets to include ‘other organisations’, not just copy shops.

The most important addition is step 5: you must print, stamp and sign the photocopy licence page and bind it with the photocopy. That way, each photocopy comes with original proof that it’s a fully legal photocopy.

Next, we’ve made small changes to the ‘Definitions’ section:

Publishers (or other rightsholders) have appointed Paperight as an agent to provide specific printing licences to outlets to print or photocopy the books listed on paperight.com.

In the ‘Termination’ section, a one-word change, since now licences might be for printing or for photocopying:

You may close your account from your dashboard on paperight.com, either by disabling the entire account, or by removing your agreement to these outlet terms specifically. While your account is closed or while you have removed your agreement to these outlet terms, the terms of this agreement still apply to existing print licences (i.e. licences you have already acquired) and any monies owing between the parties.

In the ‘Licences’ section, we’ve changed a few words:

All documents on and from Paperightlisted on paperight.com are subject to copyright. That means you cannot make any extra copies without a new licence (unless specified otherwise on the document itself).

That change was just for clarity, it doesn’t change meaning. The next few changes to wording are also just for clarity:

When you download a Paperight document or a photocopy licence, by default you have a licence to print that document once. If one customer needs multiple copies, include multiple copies in your licence when you buy it. Then you are allowed to print the document that number of times for that customer. (E.g. if when purchasing you select ‘Number of copies: 3’, you may print that document 3 times for that same customer.)
You must provide the customer’s full name every time you buy a licence. If the customer is an institution, include the name of their representative (such as the person placing the order with you).
On PDFs from paperight.com, the customer’s name will then appear on each page of their document, along with a unique tracking code. We recommend including the customer’s phone number as well, so that you can contact them if needed, and uniquely identify them among other customers with the same name.
You must not reprint one customer’s document for another customer.
Each licence only allows you to print out a document once, and to sell that print-out to a customer. Once you have printed a document, you must delete all copies of the digital files you have downloaded. You may not give or sell the digital files to anyone.

In the ‘Credits’ section, a tiny change for clarity:

Credits are pegged in value to the US dollar, but are not necessarily converted at a 1:1 rate. Any amounts shown on paperight.com in your local currency are approximate currency conversions for that day forfrom credits to dollars and from dollars to your currency. The actual amounts that your bank or credit-card provider charge you may differ slightly, and may include service and currency-conversion charges.

In the ‘Marketing’ section, we’ve made a small change to accommodate our new, broader service:

An outlet may advertise its book-printing Paperight-related services, and it may refer to Paperight in its marketing messages and materials. The word ‘Paperight’ must be correctly spelled. You may not use the Paperight logo, or try to reproduce it in any form, without the written permission of Paperight.

That’s it. As you can see, we like to keep things simple.

Publisher agreement

Our first change is to add a reference to photocopy-licensing to the ‘Definitions’ section:

Paperight is a service that lets publishers sell licences to registered outlets. These licences allow the outlets to print and sell copies of the Rightsholder’s documents, which Paperight provides to them as watermarked PDFs, and/or allows them to legally photocopy the Rightsholder’s documents under license. Paperight is only one of the channels that a publisher might use to make its works available, and does not claim to be exclusive.

In the ‘Term and termination’ section, some small changes to accommodate photocopy-licensing:

Either party may suspend or terminate this agreement by notifying the other in writing with 14 days notice. If that happens, outstanding earnings owed to the Rightsholder will still be paid according to the Compensation terms below. Watermarked documents and photocopy licences may still be available to print through the Paperight system during the notice period.
Paperight will take reasonable steps to ensure that the Rightsholder’s documents are not available for licensing, download or purchase by outlets or their customers by the termination date.

The main changes are to the ‘Operating policies and procedures’ section, where we now make clear distinctions between our existing print-on-demand service and our new photocopy-licensing service, and explain how you choose to use each one.

Paperight provides print-on-demand distribution and photocopy licensing.

  • Print-on-demand distribution: The Rightsholder will provide documents and document metadata to Paperight for distribution via paperight.com. For distribution to registered outlets, Paperight will resize these documents and place them on new page sizes (such as A4), along with fineprint containing selected details of each licence, including the names of the Rightsholder, the outlet, and the outlet’s customer, and the date of the licence. The Rightsholder may specify which documents should and should not be made available to outlets at any time, and in which countries.
  • Photocopy-licensing: The Rightsholder will provide document metadata to Paperight for listing on paperight.com. The Rightsholder may specify which documents should and should not be made available for licensed photocopying to outlets at any time, and in which countries.

In the metadata for each document, the Rightsholder will elect to allow print-on-demand distribution and/or photocopy licensing.

In the ‘Responsibilities of Rightsholder and Paperight’ section, we’ve added some wording to reflect the difference between print-on-demand and photocopy-licensing in the outlets’ responsibilities:

Customer’s full name, every time: An outlet must provide the customer’s full name (e.g. first and last name) each time it buys a licence. When printing on demand, the customer’s name will then appear on each page of their document, along with a unique tracking code. An outlet may not re-print one customer’s document for another customer.

In the ‘Licences’ section, a phrase for clarity that includes photocopy-licensing:

When a registered outlet requests a licence to print or copy a copyright work (e.g. a book, journal or document) on paperight.com, they are automatically granted a license by the Rightsholder to reproduce and distribute the requested copyright works which the Rightsholder has made available through Paperight.

All done. Thanks for trawling through that. If you have any questions or suggestions, please let us know.

What a(n award-winning) week!

Arthur appreciating the Accenture Apex award trophy.

Great news: Paperight won two massive innovation awards last week. Woo!

Paperight took first place at the Frankfurt Book Fair Contec Startup Showcase in Germany last Tuesday, before we picked up the Apex award for the most innovative small company in South Africa at the Accenture Innovation Index Awards in Sandton on Thursday evening.

The Contec Startup Showcase was held as a precursor to the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world’s largest and most internationally-represented publishing industry event. Paperight beat out competitors from around the world, impressing a panel of judges with both our technological innovations and our social mission.

The Accenture Innovation Index Awards was launched to promote business growth and new enterprises in aid of job creation in South Africa. The awards were open to any organisation, irrespective of industry or size, and were judged on each organisation’s innovation ecosystem – from human resources to branding, from marketing to product development. Paperight was named as the winner of the Apex award, awarded to an organisation with an annual turnover under R40 million. The winner of the Zenith award, given to an organisation with an annual turnover over R40 million, was awarded to First National Bank (FNB).

These awards come after Paperight won major publishing innovation awards in New York City and London earlier this year

So, again, a massive thank you to our partner publishers, outlets and supporters around the world. We are changing the face of publishing for the better in South Africa and abroad.

Improving our privacy policy

Any time you use a website, it gathers info about you (it’s often also called ‘user data’). Sometimes quite a lot of info. So good web businesses have a public policy explaining what info they gather and how they use it. It’s usually called a privacy policy.

We published our privacy policy a year ago. We were still figuring out how best to do this, and over the last year we’ve talked and received feedback about our first version. We’re now making some changes to improve it, mainly to the parts that apply to publishers.

None of the changes mean that we gather more info or use it in new ways. The changes only clarify what we do in better terms, so that our publishing partners can rest assured that we’re being sensible with their info. Continue reading Improving our privacy policy

Join us at the Open Book Festival!

open-book_logo_20130724The excitement is building in the run up to the Open Book Festival, one of the premiere events on the South African literary calendar! Set in Cape Town, the event brings local and international writers together to talk about things that matter – and we’re going too!

On Saturday the 7th of September 2013, we’re hosting a panel discussion titled “Young Writers, Big Futures” to explore the successes of the Paperight Young Writers’ Anthology 2013 and the challenges of developing writers in South Africa. Hosted by our CEO Arthur Attwell and featuring an appearance from esteemed author (and our foreword contributor) Niq Mhlongo, this is a great opportunity to come together as a big Paperight family and celebrate our mission of bringing every book within walking distance of every home.

So, we’d love you to join us. The event will be held at the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town on 7 September and tickets are going for R30 per person. Come around, say hi, meet some of our great young writers, and see for yourselves what we’re up to. For more information about the event and to purchase tickets, click here.

Brace yourselves: matric exams are coming!

Paperight matric packs: accessible learning at last!

Paperight Matric Exams coverOut of the over-1 700 brilliant books we have on Paperight, the ones that sell the most are our packs of past matric exam papers. We think it’s because they are probably the most easy and accessible way for matric learners to get their hands on these valuable learning resources. (Don’t believe us? Click here to find our how it took us six months to source all the exams ourselves!)

Paperight’s matric packs are cost-effective for both learners and copy shops. All subjects come in multi-year and single-year versions, with each containing all papers, answers and addenda for a subject in a given year or years. They are also relatively high-volume documents, helping outlets’ machines keep printing. Everyone wins.

(They’re also awesome to sponsor and give to needy schools.)

Paperight past matric exam packs are available for all languages and subjects from 2008 to 2012. Click here to see all Paperight multi-year exam packs and here to see all Paperight single-year exam packs.

Oxford University Press and Mindset Learn study guides: taking it to the next level

If matrics need some extra help with their exam preparation, we also have the best study guides around from Oxford University Press and Mindset Learn.

OUP Exam Success coverOUP’s Exam Success series of high school study-guides emphasise a holistic approach to studying, offering mock exam questions, practical studying suggestions and timetables to learners, helping them to maximise the amount of knowledge and insight they gain from the time they spend in front of their books. Exam Success guides are available in 15 subjects in English and Afrikaans, as well as for a selection of languages and English literature set works. Click here to find them.

 

Mindset Learn’s Revision X-Sheets and Comprehensive Study Notes offer super cost-effective supplementary learning, available in ten subjects in English. Click here to find them.

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We’re helping more matrics get prepared for the most important exams of their lives, and outlets can get in on the action. Get in touch with us if you want us to make you designs for flyers and posters to advertise them in and outside your shop!

Adopt a school and bring matric success to underprivileged schools

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It is no secret that the education system in South Africa is not where it should be. The assistance of the private sector is desperately needed in many neighbourhoods where schools are under-financed, in disrepair or under-resourced.

Paperight has this week started an Adopt-A-School campaign, the idea for which came about when Minuteman Press Cape Town owner Rob Brickhill contacted Paperight to assist him in finding a school in need of extra support.

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“I wanted to find a school that is really in need of help,” Rob said. He had recently registered with Paperight and realised that he had direct access to study materials to assist the schools he wanted to assist.

After some searching, Paperight introduced Rob Brickhill to Silverstream Secondary School in Manenberg on the Cape Flats. Last year the school suffered the lowest matric pass rate in the Western Cape in 2012, with a disappointing 34.2% of its matric class managing to pass.

It’s not surprising then to learn that living circumstances for many students at the school are particularly difficult. “We have some learners who live alone in shacks nearby whilst their parents are in the Eastern Cape”, said Mrs. Essa, a teacher at the school.

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Rob Brickhill and Mrs. Essa discussed the requirements of the school and provided the matriculants with Grade 12 study guides and teaching guides to assist the teachers with improving their productivity. With the assistance of private companies and donors like Minuteman Press Cape Town, the school will be able to help their matrics make a success out of their schooling careers and the rest of their lives.

By partnering with Paperight, both private individuals and photocopy shops can make a massive difference to the lives of hundreds of learners and teachers in desperate need of quality educational resources. We offer packs of past matric exam papers, Oxford University Press Exam Success study guides and hundreds of other books on our print-on-demand system.

If you are would like to get involved by adopting a school and supplying them with much-needed educational supplements, or would just like to find out more about our programme and what it takes, please contact us at team@paperight.com or 021 671 1278. 

What makes a Paperight outlet a good bookstore?

Paperight now has over 160 active outlets throughout South Africa. Naturally, some of these outlets are more active than others, and some are better at selling Paperight products than others. This post is to show you what sort of thinking and marketing is going into some of the most successful Paperight outlets.

Marketing: where do we stand?

Curiously, most Paperight-registered outlets have not used any form of marketing to advertise their print-on demand book service, which is strange, seeing as advertising is (rather obviously) the most effective way to inform customers about your services.

Below is a list of the number of sheets of A4 paper printed by selected outlets when selling books via Paperight.

  • Urban Eastern Cape Outlet: 19822
  • Urban Western Cape Outlet: 14740
  • Rural Eastern Cape Outlet: 12422
  • Franchise store #1: 9529
  • Franchise store #2: 7998
  • Franchise store #3: 7424

All of these stores were selling respectable amounts of books with simple advertising, like posters. But the top three on that list got much bigger returns than franchise stores – which have much bigger advertising budgets and much more swish marketing potential – because of these simple things:

At the Rural Eastern Cape outlet, the owner, who runs the outlet out of his home, went to meet with teachers at schools and spoke with students in person. The Urban Western Cape Outlet’s improved sales came after a High School principal approached them after discovering them on Paperight’s outlet map and purchased past matric exam papers for their small matric class. (This initial order also led to a follow up order less than 2 months later.) The Urban Eastern Cape Outlet placed Paperight posters strategically at the entrances of nearby schools and within their outlets. They also trained the few staff they have to use the website efficiently in order to provide great customer service.

Tapping into new markets

When students came to the Urban Eastern Cape outlet to purchase past exam papers, they also discovered that that outlet offers IT training courses. Those students have since shown interest in partaking in the courses after completing high school. If this outlet didn’t advertise effectively, those students may never have gone to that outlet and may never have known that they offer IT courses.

The same is true for your outlet. Many outlets may feel that this is not their market – but we say that it can be. Why limit your slice of the pie? A high school student may come to your store for past exam papers today; next year they may return to buy their university setworks and textbooks from you; a few years later they may return to have their thesis printed; the year after that they may return to buy Write the Winning CV; when in business they may return to have their corporate printing and marketing materials printed.

We don’t see a student, we see an opportunity. Paperight is an opportunity to attract customers to your core business via a market which you otherwise may not have had access to: the bookstore market.

Traditional bookselling is starting to fail

Unfortunately for many, traditional bookstores are fast becoming unsustainable. More and more people in South Africa’s small book-buying public are switching to e-books, taking away a large slice of income from bookstores. E-books however, cannot overcome inaccessibility to books in developing nations of Africa, Asia and South America. Especially not in a world starved of electricity to feed its needs.

On the other hand, bookstores cannot continue to keep doing business as usual and still expect to keep their doors open. Bookstores stock their shelves with books hoping that customers would buy them but, if they don’t get sold, those books get pulped. We all would like to believe that they are given to the less fortunate to stock libraries in areas where books are scarce, but the reality is that in many cases they are simply pulped or recycled.

The print-on demand service which you provide, partnered with Paperight’s system of delivery, is the ideal solution to for the growing gap being left in the market. With print-on demand, there is no need for large amounts of books to gather dust on shelves. Books are only printed as customers need them, which also means less wastage and pollution. You are in the position to offer print-on demand books today without any changes to its existing business.

All that is left now is letting everyone know that you are part of the world’s largest network of print-on demand bookstores. So, get in touch with us if you need materials for your outlet, or how about you print out a Paperight catalogue, or check out our poster archive?

Our new help video: Getting started with Paperight

Need a little bit of help navigating the Paperight website? We’ve got something for you.

The new Paperight help video covers the entire Paperight registration process, how to top up an account with credits (including the 2 different payment options), the process of finding a document, buying the license and how to download. The option to change general account settings is shown, including how to add another user or multiple users to the account.

It’s the first in a series of simple help videos that should answer your basic queries and concerns about getting the Paperight website to work well and efficiently for you.

Want to suggest something for us to cover in our next video? Feel free to drop us a line at team@paperight.com.