Reader

Our histories cling to us. We are shaped by where we come from ― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Reader program is about bringing stories and books alive for children, school students and young adults.  We do this in a variety of ways including promoting science fiction comics, African graphic novels, interactive books, mobile apps, ebooks, story telling, reading/writing projects and targeted initiatives to increase access and interest in books generally, and African books in particular.

A success story: Having discovered that piracy and high distribution costs prevents books written by African authors from being widely available and read, we started searching for a new way of doing things. Discussion forums with publishers, writers, print on demand vendors, literary agents were used to canvas ideas and approaches. DADA books and Unglue.it were part of this dialogue. Both of these organisations displayed incredible open mindedness and fresh thinking that allowed a new approach to be formed in conjunction with Afrelib.

In partnership with Afrelib, writers can now sell their works as eBooks through the Unglue.it platform whilst delivering Afrelib’s socially conscious aims of making these eBooks freely available to anyone on the planet through a Creative Commons license at a preset time and mutually agreed financial target.

The first of these is Lagos_2060 – a science fiction collection of 8 stories from 8 Nigerian writers. Lagos_2060 is now available to buy from the Unglue.it website with proceeds going to the contributing writers. When the predetermined time and/or the monetary threshold is reached, Lagos_2060 will be made available for distribution through Afrelib to all African readers under the Creative Commons license. See Afrelib e-Book initiatives and  Lagos_2060 Unglue.it Campaign

For schools, we plan to start an after school e-reader club for primary schools pupils using interactive mobile apps and African culture folk tales in 2016. Contacts us to enroll your school.