We have a number of reasons for making this an ebook programme.
- Libraries and bookshops are not easily accessible to everyone but mobile phones are everywhere.
Books that you read on your tablet or smartphone are called eBooks. eBook is short for electronic book, and that’s exactly what it is – an electronic book that you read on an electronic device like your tablet, an eReader or a smartphone.
Did you know that most South Africans (92%) own a mobile phone of some kind with the majority being smartphones (69%) and that on average, more time is spent on the internet via a mobile phone than watching TV? (Statistics from Digital in 2017: Southern Africa a report released annually by We Are Social.com and Hootsuite). - The high cost of printing a book means that the chances of new authors getting their books published in a traditional printed format are becoming increasingly less frequent. Generally, most publishers are unwilling to take the risk of the large financial outlay required to print a new author’s book and are choosing only to publish titles that they are confident are a ‘sure thing’ that will have large numbers of readers and, therefore, sales so that they can get some form of return on their investment. Sadly, with the low number of books that are being purchased in South Africa, this means that African languages in particular are under-published.
- Being able to easily and very cost-effectively distribute your book to a wide audience, combined with the ease of purchase – you can buy a book at the tap of a button – is one of the main reasons the WritePublishRead programme is an eBook programme and not a printed one. We want you to be able to Write and Publish your stories and for your stories to be Read.
- What’s more, ebooks have many advantages over printed books.
- There are thousands of books that you can download and read absolutely free. Having access to so many free eBooks will help get people comfortable with reading digitally and will encourage them to take the next step and actually buy eBooks (and, we hope, one of yours)!
- An eBook allows you to highlight, enlarge and make notes in the text, and do much more. Of course you can also do this with a paper book but it’s not as easy and not as convenient or immediate and, of course, one of the benefits of highlighting text in an eBook is that you can remove it at any time which is not possible in a paper book.
- eBooks are also far more portable: you can easily carry around your whole library on one device. Most people have their phones with them all the time which means they have easy access to an eBook whenever they have a spare moment to read.