Tag Archives: creative commons

Content

Philippa starts at Paperight

I arrived at Paperight in November of 2012 fresh out of my final LLB exams. I had seen Arthur talk about Paperight at a TEDxCapeTown event in June and felt compelled to get involved. I decided the law could wait and that I would see what I could learn from a start-up. Sitting on an exercise ball in the meeting room with the colourful stripy wall meeting the team for the first time, I felt that I had made a good decision.

I was hired as an intern so I bounced around for a while doing various tasks and getting to know the different aspects of the company.

My first task was to do some research into the Creative Commons license suite with the aim of determining whether or not we could add works carrying the Non-Commercial licence (CC-NC) to the Paperight site. Creative Commons licences allow copyright owners to specify which types of uses of their works they are okay with. The Non-Commercial license stipulates that the work may be used in the ways normally reserved for the copyright owner, as long as the use is “non-commercial” in nature. Although Paperight had a strong social mission, to improve access to books, it was a commercial entity. Arthur had chosen to make it a company very deliberately. He didn’t want to run it as an NGO. He wanted it to exist in the world and support itself and prove its usefulness. But being a for-profit company didn’t necessarily mean that we couldn’t use CC-NC works. It is the use that is important, not the nature of the user. In the past there were many materials in the Paperight library that were available for free download. However, by the time I arrived at Paperight a policy had been put in place that a minimum fee would be charged for each and every download. Although the minimum fee was low – only $1 – the fact that we were going to charge at all, to me, made the use commercial and thus we weren’t going to be able to put these works on the site. I don’t think this was quite the outcome Arthur was looking for, and perhaps it was due to my being so fresh out of law school, but I couldn’t really get around this outcome.

At the same time as I was working on the CC research I was gathering content leads and adding them to the content leads list. This involved searching for information about popular books that we would want to put on Paperight. I began looking for books that were CC licensed or in the public domain, and gathered some general metadata about the books. I also gathered metadata for books that were in copyright and sorted them according to publisher so that Tarryn could see which publishers we needed to approach to get them signed up, and what books to ask them for. This process was a mixed bag of interesting finds and tedious data collection. But I did come out of it with a long “to-read” list.

Content

Michal starts working at Paperight

Michal began working as an intern at Paperight in December 2011. He assisted in the development of the list of 1000 open and public domain titles. Together we researched product leads, sourced documents, compiled metadata, and the listed each product on Paperight 0.5.

Arthur set up the Paperight wiki, with both Michal and I as contributors. We began maintaining records of publisher registrations and ops.

With the view to creating Paperight Editions of the public domain titles on our list, I created a Paperight Edition novel template in InDesign.

paperight-edition-indd-template

One of the main challenges I began to experience was the lack of response from people who I contacted ‘cold’. It became evident that one of the most useful resources for eliciting a response, was a mutual connection (a role that Arthur often filled).

One of the main challenges I began to experience was the lack of response from people who I contacted ‘cold’. It became evident that one of the most useful resources for eliciting a response, was a mutual connection (a role that Arthur often filled).

Publishers approached

  • Shikaya (Arthur and I met with)

Publisher registrations

  • Peter Delmar (6/12/2011)
  • Anthony Hambly (31/12/2011)
Content

Project Dagobah & The Great Content Drive of 2011

I started at Paperight, as employee number one, on the 1st of November 2011. My mandate for the first four months on the Paperight Team was to get 1000 content items on to Paperight. The mission was code-named Project Dagobah, because who doesn’t love a little Star Wars?

International rights/sales managers needed more time to get familiar with the Paperight model, and we needed content as soon as possible. We decided that the most productive way forward would be to focus on public domain and open access material, and to grow our list of licensed content once we had an already established list.

I began by working with setwork lists, and approaching the rights departments of relevant publishing houses. It soon became apparent that this strategy was not going to work. International rights/sales managers needed more time to get familiar with the Paperight model, and we needed content as soon as possible.

We decided that the most productive way forward would be to focus on public domain and open access material, and to grow our list of licensed content once we had an already established list. To this end I began to draw up a list of 1000 open and public domain titles from www.gutenberg.org and www.internetarchive.org.

our-first-booksWhen I started, Arthur had already signed up a couple of publishers (our early champions). So, during this first month I also facilitated the receipt of files from EBW and The Professional and Higher Learning, and created individual posts for each of these to serve as product pages on the site. This first version of the site was hacked together in WordPress, and required manual order fulfillment via email. We called it version 0.5.

Part of my work at this stage was also learning how to approach publishers myself. I shadowed Arthur, and attended meetings with him.

Publishers approached

  • Siyavula (via email, with an intro from Arthur)
  • Faber (via email)
  • Heineman (via email)
  • Penguin SA (via email)
  • Harper Collins (via email)
  • Lexis Nexis (via email)
  • Jonathan Ball (via email)
  • Haynes (via email)
  • Juta (via email)
  • Pearson (via email)
  • WITS University Press (via email)
  • Future Managers (in person, with Arthur)

Publisher registrations (existing)

  • The Professional and Higher Partnership (10/10/2011)
  • Carolyn Jewel (6/10/2011)
  • Electric Book Works (6/10/2011)