Cassava Republic was founded four years ago in Abuja, Nigeria, with the intention of introducing African readers to local writers too often celebrated only in Europe and America, and to encourage home-grown writing, “rooted in African experience in all its diversity, whether set in filthy-yet-sexy megacities such as Lagos, in little-known rural communities, in the recent past or indeed the near future.”

Cassava faces all the usual pressures of a small publisher in a developing industry: poor or almost total lack of design, typesetting and printing services, non-existent distribution channels, a lack of an established network of booksellers and readers. All their books are designed and typeset in the UK, despite the added costs this brings, and printed in India. Sales reps spend most of their time in coffeeshops and hairdressers, where the real book sales occur; traditional bookstores are dingy, unfriendly places which trade almost exclusively in the textbooks and government publications that make up the overwhelming majority of the African market.

Despite these challenges, Cassava has had a number of successes, not least with childrens’ books. Their specially-commissioned collection of stories by Fatima Akilu sets seven stories to accompany the United Nations’ 7 Millennium Development Goals. Many Nigerian children grow up without ever seeing a picture book; for most of those that do, the stories will be alien to them the characters will not look like them and their lives will not resemble theirs. Akilu’s stories give those children real empowerment—to girls as well as boys—as well as opening up the possibilities, for Cassava, or developing and licensing the characters further.

Internet access, while still in development in Nigeria, is expanding rapidly, thanks to physical infrastructure. Previously the whole country was served by a single government-funded undersea cable. A new, privately-owned cable landed just last week, promising to increase Nigeria’s connected bandwidth twentyfold, with several more cables due in the next few years. Over 1m Nigerians use Facebook, and Cassava are eager to exploit this increased connectivity to reach readers who have not yet explored local and Pan-African writing.

Contemporary Africa is particularly present in Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s I Do Not Come To You By Chance, which tells the story of Kingsley, a young man eager to help his family and change the world. “When his once-proud family descends into poverty after his father falls ill, he is forced to turn to his mother’s infamous brother, Cash Daddy, who runs a successful empire of email scams relieving gullible Westerners of their hard earned money.” I can’t help (because I’m slightly obsessed) but be reminded of Chetan Bhagat’s One Night at the Call Center, because it points to a publishing model which engages with the lives of real, young people now, in their localities, rather than reaching out to a foreign audience, and in return, holds out the possibility of uncovering a wholly new and untapped market.

Like the small example of African Science Fiction, the future of all publishing in Africa promises new business models, new approaches to readers, and new literatures. What an exciting future.

On Friday I met Elinor Jansz & Richard Embray from Four Corners Books. With backgrounds in publishing and the art world they came together to create one of the most beautiful small presses around.

Four Corners publish art books, with their first serious success being Come Alive!, the examining the work of Sister Corita, Catholic nun and Pop artist. Their one stated intention was “not to produce catalogues” and so the book is the primary object, with the work selected first for book and not gallery display.

However, the Come Alive! launch was naturally followed by a small exhibition of Sister Corita’s prints at Wolfgang Tillmans’ Between Bridges gallery. And their wonderfully bright and plastic Jet Age Compendium of Eduardo Paolozzi’s work at Ambit Magazine—which I wrote about at Bookkake—was similarly followed by a wonderfully bright exhibition at Raven Row. And later this year they hope to repeat the trick with the posters of Mai ’68.

With the intention of getting “art books” beyond the insular world of galleries and art bookshops, Four Corners’ Familiars series consists of illustrated books for adults, matching contemporary artists with literature. Titles include Dracula with art by James Pyman, The Picture of Dorian Gray with Gareth Jones, and my personal favourite, A Stick of Green Candy with art by Colter Jacobsen illustrating short stories by Jane Bowles and Denton Welch.

For the moment, the books are still mostly sold in art bookstores and some general bookstores – and you can order online. No, really, order them.

Amazon have just announced AmazonEncore: “a new program whereby Amazon will use information such as customer reviews on Amazon.com to identify exceptional, overlooked books and authors with more potential than their sales may indicate.” They’re now a publisher.

It’s been a while coming, but some of us have been predicting this move for some time: Amazon have finally made it to the penultimate step on the publishing chain. I say penultimate, because although they are now, by any definition, a publisher, they still appear to be cherry-picking from existing books rather than seeking out their own authors.

Their opening salvo comes in the form of Legacy, a YA fantasy novel by sixteen-year-old novelist Cayla Kluver. Legacy was originally published by Winsconsin-based Forsooth Publishing, in paperback in April 2008, when it garnered 5-star reviews and generated a teen cult. Amazon have noticed this, so they’ve bought the rights, and are putting out a hardback, Kindle and audio editions across their channels, as well as swinging the full weight of their not inconsiderable publicity machine behind it.

This is all very interesting, and we’ll see where they go next. Knowing Amazon: upwards and outwards. Those who suggest they’ll just keep picking stuff up from the little guys hasn’t been paying attention. In the last five years Amazon have, in addition to dominating online bookselling, bought a book social network, a major print-on-demand supplier, a complete end-to-end self-publishing system, pretty much the entire used books marketplace, the biggest audiobook distributor, the best iPhone ereader, and designed, built and delivered the only truly mass-market dedicated ereading device, with a proprietary format that sets them up to be the iTunes of eBooks.*

It’s big, it’s scary, it’s Amazon. But the publishing industry is under so many different pressures at the moment, this is unlikely to be as big as it could be: Amazon don’t want to annoy their major suppliers, not too much, and not yet. They will though, and by that point, they’ll be past caring. Like Google with their ebooks programme, they’ve been given so much leeway for so long, they think they can do whatever they like, and chances are, they’re right.

Still, look on the bright side: what this does suggest is that while corporate publishers will be – are – fighting for their lives, there’s still a lot of scope for the little guys, the ones who’ve always found the interesting stuff first. AmazonEncore, as it stands now, is a very good way of making out on a little book with a lot of promise, as Ms Kluver and Forsooth have been the first to find out. Here’s hoping.

*

* Updated this list as people remind me about all the other stuff Amazon own…

P.S. Amusingly though, the first result for “kindle” on amazon.co.uk is the Sony Reader.

A presentation you need to read, and not just for the explanation above of DRM: Date Repulsion Mode, the scale of cool, or why no one with a Kindle gets asked for their phone number in Starbucks.

Loads of excellent stuff on book data accessibility, XML, catalogues and innovation. And make sure you read the notes. Inspiring stuff.

Faber Finds is the new print-on-demand (POD) offering from Faber. It’s a classics list made up of old Faber titles, with the intention (I believe) of extending to a wider range of ‘forgotten classics’.

Slowly, the larger publishers are coming round to the view that much smaller publishers (such as Salt) have had for a long time: POD offers great benefits for publishers, mostly through doing away with the old and horrifically wasteful system of printing thousands of copies up front without any real idea of whether they’ll sell or not. This increasingly outmoded system is the root cause of much of the mid- and backlist malaise currently affecting the industry.

Publishers have traditionally looked down on POD as the domain of vanity publishers and cranks, largely due to the unacceptably poor quality of the final product. This disdain is no longer justified, and POD lists are starting to appear. I’ll declare my interest now: I’ve been working on a POD project for some time, the fruits of which will be available soon.

However, I don’t think many of these publishers have really got it – including Faber Finds, and the recently announced PFD list – and I’ll explain why.

Publishers have been at pains for some time to stress that what matters in their books, after the quality of the writing, is the production and presentation. The book as a premium object, well-made, lasting, and respectable. This is why they’ve stayed away from POD, and, to a large extent, ebooks, for so long. Leaving aside the fact that many, many current paperbacks produced by ‘traditional’ methods don’t really stand up to this, it has been the statement.

So what are Faber’s aims with the Finds list? They claim to have have spent a long time looking at the various POD offerings from printers, and they’ve gone with Antony Rowe over the US-owned Lightning Source (these two are the only real possibilities at the current time). At a glance, the books look good (they do on the website too), but both my editions arrived in substantially less-than-pristine condition. Both are heavily marked with dirt and even a large thumbprint – more obviously than these photographs show – a recurring problem with white-covered books, and surely one Faber could have anticipated. Far less forgivably, the Newby edition is badly cut, with jagged edges.

Dirt aside, I like the front covers, I really do, but there is little more to appreciate in these editions. They have generic back covers trumpeting not the book but the Faber Finds list. They have no introductions, nor any signs of individual craft or attention. Worst of all, they are both – and I expect the whole list is – photostat editions: straight reprints of previous editions without regard to consistent typography or the book format they are printed in. The result is acres of white space as an old edition is shoehorned into the new. POD printing costs by the page, so it’s no wonder they have to sell lots of copies before they make any money.

All of this seems to fatally undermine the publishers’ insistence on the premium object. Both of these books may technically have been ‘out of print’, but the Conrad is easily available in a much nicer edition from Amazon, and Abe Books has plenty of old editions of the Newby, all for far less than the £10 – £15 asking price of Faber Finds. So with no added extras, who is expected to buy them?

POD does offer a huge opportunity for publishers, but these current offerings from Faber and PFD appear to have more to do with hanging on to the rights to these works than any genuine desire to see them prosper. The rights to books that are out of print for a particular length of time revert to the author, and while the new technologies have muddied this issue somewhat, the lack of care and attention given to these reprints smacks of opportunism rather than any genuine benefit to readers or the authors’ estates.

We’re all for publishers using new technologies to create new markets for old as well as new books, and applaud any move in this direction, but these shoddy POD titles, coupled with the recent spate of lazily-designed, ill-conceived and just plain broken websites, suggest that publishers have a long way to go before they understand the workings of the new market.

“The blogosphere has been buzzing since the App Store launched over last weekend with comments about ‘dozy publishers’ who have missed a great opportunity to make their books available on the iPhone. But apart from a few digital PR points scored against competing publishers, there doesn’t seem to me to be any huge value in first mover advantage here for publishers, unless we want to make the decision to become software developers.”

Sara Lloyd has responded over at The Digitalist to the many comments (including ours) on this issue. She strikes a note of caution, and suggests that publishers adopt a ‘wait-and-see’ attitude – in some contrast to her excellent, and must-read, book publisher’s manifesto for the 21st Century.

But what I’m interested in is the suggestion that publishers are not in the business of developing software. I think there’s an interesting discussion here, and a couple of points to be made.

Firstly, publishers – particularly Macmillan – are already in the business of developing software. Macmillan’s MPS Technologies division built the software, BookStore, which runs key parts of many publisher’s businesses, including their own. Indeed, they even launched ebook delivery sites based on this technology, although these appear to have gone offline. The big publishers employ developers for the web, for their IT systems, for much else, most of the time.

Secondly, who better than publishers to craft such software? Most ereader technologies are built by techies who put the technology before the reading experience: the combined skills of typesetters, print designers, editors and technologists that only publishers possess could, with the right direction, produce a far superior ereader app than any we’ve seen so far.

The development of the book has always been driven by publishers. Bookselling is a business, and while I’m far less convinced of the ‘death of the book’ than appearances may suggest, a terminal attitude of ‘wait and see’ does not indicate a healthy, growing industry. Publishers have the tools at their disposal. Why not use them?

HarperCollins have just launched their online slushpile site, authonomy.com, in private beta. Authonomy allows budding authors to upload chapters of their work for the rest of the community to read and comment on.

There’s been a lot of speculation about how this would be implemented, and at first sight it looks pretty good – HC haven’t overreached themselves, they’ve simply created a site for people to join, upload their work, and read that of others’. Sounds simple, but many similar projects have failed thanks to scope creep.

Every user gets a profile where they can create a virtual bookshelf showing which other writers’ works they’re supporting – authors get the chance to create their own “cover” for a work too, a pointless but satisfying little feature which is sure to go down very well indeed.

The real challenge, of course, is to persuade wannabe writers to post their work at all – in my own personal experience, unpublished writers are terrified of their work being ‘stolen’, enough to be suspicious of publishers themselves, let alone your average web surfer. The Front List, a previous attempt at a “YouTube for books”/”crowdsourcing the slushfile”-type site, solved this by hiding everything from non-members; one approach certainly, but not one likely to bring in the crowds.

Authonomy’s FAQs wisely address many of these concerns, and they haven’t done too much to break the site in the implementation, short of disabling right-clicking on book text. As they put it, “if someone really wants to pass off your efforts as their own they’ll probably find a way” (Hint: turn off javascript). Their real attitude to the problem is more sensible: “here at authonomy, we believe that your talent is better displayed than kept hidden – and that the chances of good things happening are more likely the more hands your manuscript passes through, and the more people you enlist in your support.”

On the technical side, users upload books by chapter (as few or as many as they like) in Word or RTF formats, which are then displayed as is – imagine hitting ‘Output as web page’ in Word, if you’ve ever done such a thing. It doesn’t result in the prettiest pages, but it does mean the book appears on the site as the author made it, which is, quietly, quite a thing.

Authonomy has been a long time in the making, and in the wake of the disastrous relaunch of HarperCollins.co.uk, we feared the worst. But Authonomy (still very much in Beta, which HC.co.uk can’t claim to be) looks like a very good little set-up which is bound to get plenty of attention and users. Nice one, HC.