Comments on: Ebooks in Africa

By: Chris Meadows

Chris Meadows — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 07:13:49 +0000

Not hard for some of us to imagine. I use a Motorola RAZR2 cell phone, and I probably do more Internet stuff with it than some people do with their so-called smart phones. I'm always twittering with it, checking the Twitter website, checking my Gmail, checking mobile Yelp, mobile Accuweather, sending rudimentary e-mails, texting UPC numbers to FruCall to see what the best price is, and so on. About the only thing I haven't done is try to read e-books on it, and I should get around to trying out Wattpad sooner or later. I understand that people in Africa go even further, conducting banking through the phone the way some of us do through the desktop, simply because it's the only net terminal device they've got. It's certainly interesting to consider that there are approximately two cell phone accounts for every three people in the world. And lots of those are in the "developing" world. Funny just how fast the world develops.

By: Allen Lau

Allen Lau — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 05:54:20 +0000

It is hard for us to imagine but it is true. Many people in these developing countries read books on good old candy bar Nokia phones with tiny 128×128 pixel screens that can only display a few lines at a time. This is their only mean to access the world’s literature.

By: Steve Jordan

Steve Jordan — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 20:07:07 +0000

Websites in the developed world tend to be big and flashy, in order to get eyeballs and attention… but in many cases, they don’t need to be. Tailoring e-book sales to smaller-bandwidth markets of the developing world is often only a matter of just doing it. Most of this is simply extra work that sellers have to weigh against the expected profit.

In fact, the issues raised by financial and cultural differences in other markets are far greater than the simple task of creating a low-bandwidth website to sell products.