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Independent South African tertiary institute College Campus has signed up with Paperight to distribute course material for over 100 courses and modules through Paperight’s print-on-demand network.

The deal allows over 150 Paperight outlets throughout South Africa to legally print out College Campus materials quickly, cheaply and legally for College Campus students, who primarily study at College Campus’ two locations in Gauteng.

In addition to their Bachelor’s degrees in IT, Business Administration and Commerce, College Campus – a division of the Independent Institute of Education, the largest private provider of higher education in South Africa – offers courses and certificates in sales and marketing, web development, database management, accounting, software programmes and dozens of other fields.

“This is a very exciting partnership for us,” says Arthur Attwell, CEO and founder of Paperight. “For students, Paperight can eliminate all the usual hassles of getting your course material, especially when you live far from campus. Students are sick of bookstores not stocking enough books, and waiting for materials to arrive in the post. College Campus is really making life easier for their students.”

“Our focus at College Campus is to ensure that our tech-savvy and connected students experience seamless education delivery,” says Genevieve Allen, MD of College Campus.  “Although we fully support our students, the ethos we try to drive into them is deeper ownership and control of the learning experience which better equips students for the mobile and shifting world of work they will enter. Paperight’s innovative solution on material delivery makes them a perfect partner in this regard.”

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To find all College Campus materials available on Paperight, click here.

Paperight has won the Digital Minds Innovation Award at the London Book Fair – one of the world’s most prestigious publishing events.

The showcase was held Sunday night at the Digital Minds Conference, a precursor event to the London Book Fair, where dozens of illustrious speakers from around the publishing world speculate and postulate about evolution, innovation and disruption in the publishing industry. Keynote speakers included authors Neil Gaiman and Robert Levine, as well as Will Atkinson, Sales and Marketing Director at Faber & Faber.

Paperight beat out seven other shortlisted candidates after a short presentation in front of an audience of hundreds of the world’s publishing thought leaders, and won thanks to a popular vote.

The win comes on the back of Paperight’s win at a similar innovation showcase at the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference in New York City in February, and a seed grant from the SAB Foundation as part of their Innovation Awards. Unlike Paperight’s win at the O’Reilly Tools of Change Startup Showcase, however, where Paperight was the only shortlisted innovation from outside Europe and North America, this time Paperight also beat stiff competition from the Middle East.

“We’re incredibly honoured to have this support from the world’s leading minds in digital publishing,” said Paperight founder and CEO Arthur Attwell. “It shows that as publishers we’re serious about solving the real problems of book distribution, getting the knowledge we create into the hands of people everywhere, no matter where they live or how much they earn.”

Apropos to our post two weeks ago, we were on CNBC’s awesome Eye on Western Cape programme this past weekend. Here is the profile that Thomas Maree and Lungile Tom very skilfully put together about us and our work.

Thanks once again to Thomas and Lungile for coming through. Hope to see more of you again soon!

A week off the plane Paperight’s Content Manager, Tarryn-Anne Anderson, revisits some of the insights learnt at the 2012 Frankfurt Book Fair. 

My first experience of the Frankfurt Book Fair was, from the outset, eventful. What began with impassable language barriers and terrifyingly bad train route choices flowed into a jam-packed few days of exciting conversations, speaker events, bibliophilia, and wine (with not much room for something as unproductive as sleep).

The Messe halls in Frankfurt were, I like to imagine, the publishing industry personified. The book fair is lauded as the who’s-who of publishing discussing the what’s-what, and as such the trends in conversation mirror those of the industry itself.

This year the words on everybody’s lips were “digital, digital, digital”, with some airtime given to “discoverability” (unless they were talking about erotica). Every hall boasted an electronic twist: from ebook solutions for publishers to digital classroom innovations resplendent in 3D. And metadata, Open Access programmes, social media, and Search Engine Optimisation were all discussed as technical solutions to aid the discoverability of content in a sea of lol-cats.

Of the panel discussions I attended the one that sits most clearly in my mind was tasked with the job of considering what lessons we’ve learnt after 10 years of mainstream digital publishing. Richard Charkin (of Bloomsbury) said “This industry has adapted remarkably… academic publishing is now 90% digital, with trade at 20% and rising quickly. What we have not done is adapt our printing systems to the new world”. Much of the remaining conversation was circumscribed by the fear that ebooks would see the end of their print cousins, with paperbacks crying out “et tu brute” at the last.

What resonated for me, however, was his call for the need to bridge the gap created between print and digital – one that is ever increasing in developing countries. This gap is especially apparent when considering situations such as the Limpopo textbook crisis earlier this year. Even where print textbooks are free, or where online resources are supposedly ubiquitous, accessing educational material can still be difficult. The decisions of big publishing houses to focus on either print media or digital perpetuate this gap, and this is where Charkin’s comment really hits home.

Over all of the various fair publications, the main coverage on Africa was in relation to the OUP and MacMillian corruption scandal – which had a multipage spread in The Bookseller – with a follow up by Stephen Tweed asserting that despite the “flawed systems” there are many reasons to continue to invest in African publishing. Textbooks and educational materials were highlighted as the most lucrative by far in the African market, but Tweed noted that “the biggest threat to local and international publishers is piracy and the illegal import of market-restricted titles, particularly tertiary books”. He called for a focus on digital and innovation in new and existing technology which “provides for the children living in the slums, as well as the emerging middle class”. This is exactly what Paperight has been aiming to achieve, and it’s great to find that industry opinions are in line with our own.

Not long after the Mail & Guardian carried our own Nick Mulgrew’s great story about Zakes Ncanywa’s Paperight outlet and computer shop in rural Peddie, You magazine and its Afrikaans sibling edition Huisgenoot have followed up with their own similar story (PDF) on this wonderful entrepreneur. These are two of South Africa’s biggest magazines, and we’ve already seen an increase in Zakes’s Paperight sales since the magazine hit the shelves.