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African ebooks, music, go global

18 Dec 2018

Nigeria's digital content distribution company, Publiseer, has been working on developing new features and partnerships based on the feedback it received so far this year. Publiseer announced it would deliver digital content to over 3,000 book libraries around the world, including the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia, thanks to cloudLibrary, a lending platform by Bibliotheca.

Bibliotheca has been a highly requested distribution channel from most of Publiseer's authors, so Publiseer is really excited about this expansion of its distribution channel. Two months ago, Publiseer announced that it will be taking its library distribution even deeper with its addition of Baker & Taylor as part of its library distribution service. Now, the distribution goes even deeper with the addition of cloudLibrary.

Publiseer is a digital publisher that lets writers and musicians from low-income communities in Africa publish, promote, protect, and monetise their digital contents across hundreds of partner stores worldwide, at no charge, with just a single click. Publiseer has been described by Konbini as "one of the largest digital publishers in Africa".

These new libraries to be added to Publiseer's distribution channel have hundreds of thousands of eBooks and very engaged readers, and so this is an exciting opportunity for expanding the readership of its authors. All books published by Publiseer will be automatically be distributed to cloudLibrary after December 20, 2018.

"The upcoming holidays might delay the regular distribution process. However, we're working harder to expedite the distribution process", says Chidi Nwaogu, Publiseer's chief executive officer, who was recently invited to The Future Leaders Forum 2018 by The Future Awards Africa in partnership with the University of Sussex.

The cloudLibrary platform offers royalties based on their standard library model and "Pay Per Use" (PPU) option. With the standard library model, the library purchases a single copy of an author's book to lend out. As a book is purchased for lending, Publiseer provides a higher library price, which is three times higher than the original list price of the book at other bookstores like Amazon. Of course, the royalty of the author will be paid out after this higher price.

With the PPU option, a check-out of an author's book by a patron triggers a sale. The price of a check-out is 30% of the book's original list price. For Publiseer's authors who use the Premium Distribution Option, they get to keep all the royalties they earn from Bibliotheca.