Daily Maverick - The man turning copy shops into bookstores

"The world’s most famous schoolboy wizard helped Arthur Attwell understand that something was very amiss in the way that the publishing industry operates. It was 2007, and Attwell – at that stage running a publishing consultancy called Electric Bookworks – wanted to procure the translation rights to publish Harry Potter in isiZulu, since JK Rowling’s Hogwarts series was available only in English and Afrikaans in South Africa. Electric Bookworks was too small-fry to pull this off on its own, so Attwell asked the bigger local publishers to lend their brand to the endeavour. It won’t work, he was told, because Harry Potter is 'culturally irrelevant' here. Recounting the story, Attwell shakes his head. 'There are rural Chinese kids who translate Harry Potter a day after publication,' he said. 'It’s this myth that poor people don’t read. And in South Africa, since poverty is correlated with race, it’s the myth that black people don’t read.' Electric Bookworks, which at that stage had concentrated on helping book publishers use technology more effectively, wanted to find a better way. 'I was always uneasy that traditional book publishing means you primarily make books, and e-books, for rich people,' Attwell says. 'We started trying to find better, cheaper, ways to publish.' In 2008, Electric Bookworks began looking into print-on-demand services, researching South African factories which would print small runs of books. The smaller the book run, the smaller the factory they tried to find. Then Attwell had his eye-opening moment. 'A copy shop is the smallest possible book factory that you can find,' he explains. 'There are many of them, they’re located close to customers, and the economics of the business allow you to print books and make money.' But copy shops are sometimes considered the enemy of publishers, since some of them knowingly allow customers to infringe copyright. Others adhere strictly to copyright law: some copy shops have big signs on display warning students, for instance, that they won’t photocopy textbooks. Often there’s confusion over what’s allowed ... The South African Copyright Act allows for 'fair dealing', which means that user can copy, 'for their own study or research or private use, as much of the work as they need to meet their reasonable needs, without seeking permission from the copyright owner or paying compensation'. The Act does not specify how much you are allowed to copy, however; it’s largely circumstance-dependent. 'If you were to copy a large portion of a book or journal, and were charged with infringing copyright, it would be up to you to convince the court that your actions were fair,” Dalro warns. “It’s a total grey area as to when it starts becoming infringement,' Attwell agrees, and often it falls to copy shops to try to figure out what the legal position is when a student walks in with a textbook. Attwell realised, however, that there was a perfectly legal way for copy shops to provide customers with a copy of a book. They wouldn’t photocopy the work – they’d print it. In 2011, Attwell became a Fellow of the Shuttleworth Foundation. It was with the funding of the foundation that he was able to work on making his copy shop plan a reality. The Shuttleworth Foundation matches the investment of its fellows in entrepreneurial start-ups 10 times over: if you sink almost R200,000 into the project, as Attwell did, the foundation will follow up with R2 million. In May 2012, Attwell launched Paperight. Paperight works as follows. It enters into agreements with publishers to provide copy shops with a license to publish a particular work. Copy shops sign up with Paperight, and every time they print a copy of a book, they pay the license fees. Paperight makes its money by keeping 20% of the fee; the rest is passed back to the publisher. Paperight prepares the book into a print-optimal format, and supplies the copy shop with a PDF ready for printing watermarked with the customer’s name. For customers, the result is a product which is much cheaper than buying conventional books from a bookshop ..."