While Kader Asmal is planning a major literacy campaign, thousands of unused textbooks are gathering dust on warehouse shelves, writes Ann Eveleth
A leading educational publishing house sent 200 tonnes of books to the pulping plant this week, returning to raw paper tens of thousands of dictionaries, atlases and African language storybooks.
This latest mass demolition of reading material – in a country where 12,5-million adults are illiterate and millions more are aliterate (they can read, but don’t) – is part of a growing trend in the ailing local publishing industry. The industry has shed a quarter of its workforce in two years amid declining state textbook purchases.
Nick Evans, managing director of Heinemann publishers, said the “tragic” decision he took to pulp a warehouse full of mainly educational books was “extraordinary. I hope I never have to do this again.”
Heinemann’s decision follows hot on the heels of Maskew Miller Longman, that pulped thousands of easy-reading books last month.
Evans said Heinemann – like most publishers – pulps a relatively small amount of excess book stocks each year. But the company’s average annual pulping order of about 10 tonnes was far outstripped by this week’s clearance.
The books had been gathering dust on warehouse shelves since 1996, when the Department of Education announced plans to introduce its new Curriculum 2005, complete with new textbooks. At the same time, the government cut back on orders for grades not affected by the new curriculum, leaving publishers with back stocks.
Delays in implementing the curriculum, together with a lack of designated book budgets in the provincial educational coffers, have seen annual government textbook purchases drop from about R850- million in 1995/96 to about R200-million last year, said Evans. He said the lack of spending on textbooks had lead to the loss of about 2 000 of industry’s 8 000 jobs in the past two years. “I have had to retrench 50 people out of a workforce of 130 in the past two years,” he added.
Adviser to Minister of Education Kader Asmal, Allan Taylor, said this week Evans’s criticism of declining state spending was “fair comment”, but added that this occurred against a backdrop of the government’s attempt to reduce the budget deficit in terms of the growth, employment and redistribution strategy, as well as the rising costs of salaries due to the post- apartheid equalisation of teacher-salary scales.
Taylor said Asmal wanted to meet publishers to discuss ways of stemming the crisis. He added: “If a publisher approached us with books they were going to pulp, we could have made a plan.”
Evans said Heineman had made extensive efforts to donate the excess books to NGOs and libraries, including a warehouse sale last week. “We donated about 100 tonnes of books, reducing the pulping order by one- third. The rest we can’t even give away. The Department of Education doesn’t have the capacity to distribute this many books at short notice,” said Evans.
Heinemann will not recoup the money it had invested in the publications. Evans said the cost price of the books amounted to about 10% of the company’s annual turnover, with a retail figure three times higher. “We simply cannot afford to continue storing so many books that we can’t sell or even give away.”
According to Elisabeth Anderson, head of the Centre of the Book, the problem lies “not only with the publishers, but with the distributors of books, including teachers and librarians, who aren’t aware of what is available from the publishers. South African publishers are still not moving in the direction of publishing for a mass market. There are still very few books available for the majority of South Africans, especially in African languages.
“The publishers complain that these books don’t sell, but that’s because they aren’t marketing them well enough. The booksellers say there is no market, but that is because the booksellers live in white, urban areas. There are no general bookstores in the majority of black areas.”
Beulah Thumbadoo, co-ordinator of the Easy Reading for Adults Initiative, said many publishers had taken a risk by agreeing to publish easy-reading books in African languages.
But these had not sold well, “because there is an information gap between the providers and distributors of books. The government thinks the books can sit for ever with the publishers, and the libraries have no idea what is available.”
The need for better strategy and organisation across the book sector was first mooted in the 1997 Research Report on Book Development in South Africa, commissioned by the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology. The report noted that “public spending is the major lever for change in developing the [book] market” and called for the urgent devolution of book purchasing power to schools. But the report’s findings became bogged down in controversy amid the sector’s competing interest groups, and it has not seen the light of day.
The Easy Reading for Adults Initiative drafted a proposal containing many of the report’s recommendations, together with a call for the government to declare the next 10 years a “decade of reading”. That proposal was delivered to then deputy president Thabo Mbeki in January. It has also been submitted to the Transitional National Development Trust, the National Arts Council and the Department of Education.
The government still has not responded, in spite of a promise by Asmal to “break the back of illiteracy” in South Africa by 2004. Taylor said the proposal was well received by the government, and pointed out that Asmal had called for a special focus on reading to form part of the planned national literacy campaign. Taylor said Asmal hoped to announce details of his national literacy campaign by the end of the year.