Children and adults who are not good readers will be lost in the information society of today because of the high level of literacy required in virtually every area of our lives — from street signs to ATMs, from product descriptions to medicine dosage instruction, from newspapers to books.
But less than than 10% of high schools have libraries. There is only one library for every 25 000 South Africans and on a national level the situation is critical, with library budgets plummeting from R22-million in 2000 to R12-million this year.
On the other hand, only 4% of South Africans buy books. One of the reasons for this, as often mentioned by the general public, is that books are too expensive.
In schools there seems to be a trend to invest the resources available for books in textbooks rather than in readers. This trend is also apparent in adult basic education, where little is invested in books written to promote reading for enjoyment.
There is a perception that this sort of book is of less value than a technical textbook, and that spending money on simple fiction is frivolous. As a result, efforts to produce easy-to-read books in all 11 South African indigenous languages get scant support from either state learning institutions or NGOs.
South Africa has the largest publishing industry in Africa and is said to be capable of producing books of international quality at much lower prices than those of imported books. Then why is it that the price of books, both fiction and educational, still remains so high? Is this a matter of fact or perception? And is it really only the publishers who are to blame?
Seven years after a recommendation to do so, the Print Industries Cluster Council and the government are set to conduct research into ways of increasing indigenous publishing; assessing the impact, accessibility and consumption of reading material and considering strategies to increase these.
The obvious costs in producing a book are paper, printing and the procurement of the written word — that is, the author’s royalties. The not-so-obvious and often forgotten expenditure includes research and development, art work, binding, warehousing, marketing and distribution, bad debt and collection expenses, cash flow, free promotional copies and other general business expenses. It all goes back to supply, demand and comparative advantage.
In its research report on book development in South Africa, the Book Development Council of South Africa (BDCSA) noted that the producers of books in South Africa competently produce high-quality books on a range of subjects. But we need more information to discern whether merchandisers are truly competitive and doing their best for the consumer.
Jill van Zyl of Exclusive Books refutes the notion that bookstores and publishing companies are out to make money, along with another familiar claim about books being more expensive in South Africa than, for example, in the United Kingdom.
“Often the UK price is on the book, so you can do your own calculation. Exclusive Books can’t change the prices of their books every week because the rand fluctuates. But as the rand has got better over the past year, the prices of new books are cheaper than they were a year ago.” The South African publishing industry has geared itself towards the school-book trade and publishers who sell general books rely heavily on imports, so there has been little provision for reading in indigenous African languages.
This reliance on the production of school books for bulk purchasing by education departments is a common survival strategy among publishers in countries such as South Africa — where illiteracy, poverty and social and economic instability hamper the development of a culture of reading and book-buying. The collapse of the textbook market in the 1990s in South Africa — where education departments lacked both the funds to purchase textbooks and the capacity to distribute them — was disastrous for publishers. The local publishing industry shrank by 40% between 1990 and 2000.
As the price of books is heavily dependent on the print run, the higher the print run, the lower the price. The reason that textbooks from the United States are relatively cheap is that the publishers are able to print a minimum of 10 000 books in any print run.
‘The fact is that very few South African textbooks sell more than between 3 000 and 4 000 copies a year in present circumstances. If some standardisation could be achieved, textbooks and readers that serve a number of institutions could be produced, increasing print runs and bringing down prices,” explains Eve Horwitz-Gray of Juta Higher Education Publishing.
It would also be better if publishers could spend more on stronger covers and binding so that a textbook would last up to four years, instead of the government forking out money every year for cheaper-made books that do not last.
Unfortunately, the culture of looking after books, keeping them safe and returning them at the end of the year is not a consistent feature of South African schools.
The price of books will always be affected by variables such as the cost of labour, exchange-rate fluctuations and supply and demand, but it has been said that the South African publishing industry is doing the best it can under the circumstances.
According to the BDCSA, the government has a major role to play in growing an informed reading public. Public-private partnerships represent the most constructive mechanism for developing the sector as quickly as possible, but public spending is the major lever for change in developing the market.
The formulation of a national book policy as part of the national development plan will do a great deal to drive this process.
But work towards a book policy that was being driven by the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology has yet to see the light of day. There are several issues that relate to the reduction of book costs, which fall under the jurisdiction of the Department of Trade and Industry.
The decision to drop value-added tax on books, the subject of recent emotional debate, could only be made by the Treasury.
It seems, therefore, that overarching, high-level political will is required to prioritise books and reading — in line with the United Nations Educational, Science and Cultural Organisation’s objectives for its decade of literacy (2003 to 2013) — and this cannot be accomplished by ministries working in isolation nor by reading programmes operating without a supportive national environment.
Elitha van der Sandt of the Print Industries Cluster Council says: “Developing a reading culture would increase book-buying, which, in turn, would lead to greater economies of scale in the production of books and, ultimately, result in lower prices. The uppermost question in our minds should not be ‘are books expensive?’ but ‘how are we going to get people to read?'”
You might wonder how book shops and publishers survive if books really are that expensive. Even if price is a consideration for some people because they do not have lots of disposable income — if they value books, they will buy them.
“There are more confident, well-dressed, articulate, young, black people buying at Exclusive Books,” says Van Zyl. “Less fiction is being sold and more motivational, self-help and popular psychology is being bought by this market in a bid for ongoing self-improvement.”
The bottom line is: there are enough people with money to support bookshops and publishers. The challenge lies in creative solutions for those who do not have the money.
Beulah Thumbadoo writes on behalf of the Education Rights Project at the Education Policy Unit, Wits University