Xarra, an independent bookshop in Newtown, Jo’burg, was the place where Pumla Dineo Gqola’s What Is Slavery to Me? was launched. Years ago, one imagines, this title would have been launched only in rarified university halls.
It could be what Veronica Klipp from Wits University Press means when she says scholarly publishing in South Africa has “managed quite successfully to break into the general [non-academic] trade market”.
Publishers achieved this by “breaking down the boundaries between general and scholarly books in terms of accessibility and good production values”, Klipp says.
But there are still “very few outlets where readers interested in academic books can browse” and the review of scholarly works is, “with one or two exceptions, almost nonexistent”.
At a time when the literary market has contracted because of the recession, the sole way to turn things around is for publishers and booksellers to cooperate, she says.
She believes that an active library system, the mainstay of most publishing industries, is steadily being eroded as a result of the lack of support by government.
“The apparent lack of interest in the book sector on the side of government is inexplicable as the knowledge contained in books is a vital ingredient of a democratic society,” Klipp says.
Government hasn’t just been watching disinterestedly from the sidelines, however.
At this year’s Cape Town Book Fair, for instance, the departments of trade and industry and arts and culture chipped in with cash to help local publishers.
Although Klipp is of the opinion that publishing in South Africa has grown in the past decade, her impression is that “many companies are struggling”.
This is especially the case with scholarly publishers, which are “small organisations catering for a small local market” and are therefore dependent on support from their institutions, making them vulnerable.
Looking ahead, Klipp believes electronic publishing will present “new possibilities for the academic market” even if the majority of e-sales will be recorded in the bestseller fiction category.
“Early feedback suggests that readers will want print editions of their valued and long-lasting or classic titles,” she says.
The marketing manager at Unisa Press in Pretoria, Hetta Pieterse, is impressed with the growth of her organisation.
“We have grown dramatically, especially in the past year in terms of our journals count, which is now 41,” she said. This, coupled with the fact that it has exceeded its target of publishing 20 books this year, makes it the biggest university press in Africa.
“We published more than 30 book titles in 2010,” Pieterse says.
Looking ahead, she hopes her organisation will do “more electronic publishing and more collaborative work”.
She also wants to publish work by authors and scholars from the rest of the continent.
Pieterse says Unisa Press’s profile has increased in general, largely because of the popularity of the books it has published, books like Gaby Magomola’s Robben Island to Wall Street and the photography book Defiant Images by Darren Newbury.
“We are in the process of changing the type of books we publish,” she says, because Unisa Press intends to blur the divide between scholarly and general interest books.
It should increase the public’s interest in its titles — that and sexier book designs to bring some joie de vivre to its often mournful-looking books.