PALM Africa

The Cape Town Book Fair was the major happening this last weekend - a long weekend with the Youth Day holiday on Monday celebrating South Africa's young people in commemoration of  the 1976 Soweto uprising. The Book Fair is a hugely successful event, a partnership between the Publishers' Association of South Africa and the Frankfurt Book Fair that attracts some 50,000 people to a glossy and spacious conference centre at the harbour end of downtown Cape Town. At the same time, celebration of the role of youth was muted as the country agonised over the role of a turbulent and disaffected youth in the wake of the xenophobic violence of the last few weeks. The Book Fair risks providing illusory but comforting images of the rainbow nation; while in the chilly and wet winter weather outside, stories of refugees huddled in leaking tents in windswept seaside camps reminded us of the dystopia that is South Africa's nasty underbelly.

Is a book fair then just an irrelevance? Is reading only for the wealthy (and white)? Certainly the people pouring through the turnstiles and wandering down the aisles were a fairly pale version of the rainbow nation. Nevertheless, attendance at the Book Fair does make it clear that there is a hunger among a wider range of South Africans than are to be seen in our bookshops for books, reading, information, knowledge, culture...

Walking through the fair was an interesting exercise. The first book fair, three years ago, was a rather first world affair, with a lot of UK publishers in attendance and some very large and very flash stands of the multinational publishers. Now, the big players are still there, but in the form of their South African companies. Where there were UK publishers in attendance was on the stands of the academic textbook companies, where imports still dominate. There were a lot of Indian stands and quite a few African publishers. But it is what was revealed about who the South African publishers are that was most interesting.

In the context of the PALM Africa project, the Cape Town Book Fair certainly raises a lot of questions. PALM Africa asks some very pragmatic questions about what strategies are needed to provide access to knowledge in an African context. In particular it looks at what combinations of licences – for free content or commercial distribution – would be most effective in providing this access. A PALM workshop held in Uganda a few weeks ago highlighted the fact that in Africa, there is still not enough connectivity to allow for democratic access to digital content: print is needed. We are still a way from a digital utopia that could provide free access to So it was interesting to hear that the buzz of the Book Fair was print on demand. Would distributed print on demand across Africa provide a solution to the availability of appropriate knowledge materials? Or is the unit cost of POD simply too high? What is clear is that as long as print is needed, there have to be commercial models for the provision of physical books.

The questions are: In a world that is overwhelmingly dominated by content from the North, how can one grow the voice of Africa? How well does the commercial publishing sector provide for this and what alternative models/publishers can there be? And how was this reflected in the exhibitors at the Cape Town Book Fair? What interested me most was the number of alternative publishers there. These include the public benefit and NGO publishers who we are recognising in PALM as substantial research publishers, untracked and unrecorded in publishing industry surveys, but probably outpublishing the formal sector scholarly publishers, with the exception perhaps of the open access HSRC Press. These publishers have for many years posted their content online and, although they do not tend to use open licences (opting instead for 'all rights reserved' although they explicitly allow free downloads, or the absence of any copyright notice in the mistaken understanding that this makes the content free) they do operate a publishing model that aims at maximum social impact through the availability of free online content and printed publications for sale. Unlike the formal publishers, they do not limit themselves to the conventional scholarly genres of scholarly books and journals, but publish whatever is needed to meet their development goals: research reports, policy briefs, newsletters, community handbooks and training materials. These are the organisations that are mediating research knowledge to the public, aiming to create social impact for South African research.

Walking the aisles, I met Neil Verlaque Napper of the Storyteller Group, which publishes comic book popularisations that address major issues in a way that has great impact and reach on commission from government and donors. This is a reminder of another strong strand of alternative publishing: the 'edutainment' publishers whose sustainability model is public funding for materials development in a range of media and who have high levels of skill in materials design, communication skills for reaching mass audiences and pedagogic expertise in getting messages across. The most prominent example is probably Soul City, which describes itself as 'a dynamic and innovative multi-media health promotion and social change project', using TV, radio and print, to get its message across in whichever medium is appropriate. Again, many of the print materials are available for free download.

Then there were cultural initiatives, like the Chimurenga literary magazine, which has gone to a lot of trouble to involve their authors in the licensing of online content and are providing one of the liveliest forums for literary development and discussion in print and online. It is here that one encounters most vividly the authors and cultural activists who are not provided for in the literary establishment.

And what about Novel Idea ,where Michelle Matthews is developing the really novel idea of cell phone downloads for fiction, plugging this with tantalising promotional teasers and getting a strong response. Send an sms and get your download of a chapter of a novel. This is part of a lively community of young writers and book people, the one place where digital media were surfacing at the book fair. Electric Book Works, a driving force in this community, gave a workshop on Tuesday on digital publishing strategies.

What, then, about the youth who were being celebrated in Monday's holiday? They are the recipients of some of the edutainment publishing; the objects of studies in the NGO and scholarly publishing sectors; participants to an extent in the alternative literary scene; But, as Adam Haupt, author of Stealing Empire, pointed out in an HSRC workshop, and as Dave Chislett discussed over coffee, the real action is in performance, township hip-hop counterculture, oral and music traditions, The book industry is not, as Dave points out in his blog today either trying to understand where the potential readers could be, not engaging actively with alternative media alongside traditional books.

There is a lot for the PALM project to engage with.