The Academic Book of the Future project has been unusual in bringing together so many communities of practice concerned with the future of the book: academics, publishers, libraries and archives, booksellers. Its reach, too, has not been limited to the UK: we also have participants in Europe and the US. And one of the key areas we have been investigating is the situation with book publishing and distribution in the Global South, particularly in Africa, India and the Middle East.
In this lecture, I will be discussing the changes wrought to book publishing and dissemination by the digital turn in the Global South.
I will also be discussing two large-scale digitisation initiatives in Africa that I am involved in: the digitisation of the Gacaca archives in Rwanda (60 million pages of documents relating to the post-genocide legal process) and the digitisation of a range of cultural heritage materials in the Sudan: Digital Sudan.