In the last three months we’ve got a few concrete things out the door.
- 20 June 2012: Our help site for outlets and publishers is up.
- 2 July: Our team (mostly Nick, really) starts producing great posters every two weeks for outlets to download and print for in-store promotion:
- 1 August 2012: Our full-page ad in Live Magazine is out.
- 30 August 2012: We finalised a very important deal with the Jetline chain of copy shops, which we reported on our blog here.
I’ve also been getting around to spread the word.
- 24 July 2012: Interviewed on Cape Talk drive-time radio with John Maytham.
- 21 July 2012: Gave a well-received talk at TEDxCapeTown. Here’s the text of the talk and here’s the video.
- 14 July: Presented at Talking Heads in Cape Town about Paperight (Talking Heads project page)
- 11 July: Spoke to an enthusiastic group of high-school kids at Enke:forum.
- 19 June 2012: Chaired a panel discussion with Alan Knott-Craig Jr and Gus Silber on their new book ‘Mobinomics’. Here’s the Bookslive report.
- 28 August 2012: I was interviewed for if:book Australia about Paperight. Here’s a snippet video, the full video interview is coming later, apparently.
A bunch of people are joining our thinking:
- 23 August 2012: Little interview with an enthusiastic “citizen journalist”. I posted the full text of the interview on our blog.
- 26 July 2012: You Magazine and Huisgenoot describe Paperight in a feature article called “No textbooks? No problem!”, a profile on Zakes Ncanywa in You Magazine and Huisgenoot, by Pieter van Zyl. (Article concept and much of the execution taken from Nick Mulgrew’s earlier piece in the Mail & Guardian, mentioned in my last quarterly report.) You and HuisGenoot have a combined readership of over 4 million.
- 25 July 2012: Nice pieces on the Mellville House publishing company’s blog about Paperight and the Publishing Genius Press (Baltimore) blog.
- 24 July 2012: Lots of re-hashing of a press release we did with Realm Digital across many IT websites, including this piece on ITWeb and half a dozen others.
- Nice blog post about Paperight by Africa-tech blogger Jacques Coetzee
- 14 July 2012: “Desperate teachers flout copyright to help publish books”, an article in the Weekend Post (Port Elizabeth) by Barbara Hollands mentions Paperight. (We couldn’t get an electronic copy or web link sadly.)
- 12 July 2012: One of our champion publishers in the UK, Anthony Haynes, blogged about Paperight again.
And on my personal blog, a few Paperight-related pieces:
- 14 August 2012: An email interview with a publishing MA student titled ‘Trade publishing challenges in South Africa’.
- 8 August 2012: An interesting anecdote about textbooks in Rabat.
- 9 July 2012: A thorough view on why schoolbook-purchasing is broken, called ‘The weakest links in schoolbook publishing’.