Sunday 16 October 2016

Reading the World



Interesting lady. You can find her blog: A Year of Reading the World here. There's also a nice little article, which explains more about her project. I wrote a while back about how lack of access to PayPal and the digital market is crippling for authors in many economically developing countries. Here in Rwanda, it doesn't matter if you write a book. You can't sell it internationally as there's no way to take the electronic payments integrated with Amazon, Smashwords and other online book dealers. Not without a third-party UK, US or Kenyan PayPal account. You can make payments, so you can buy things online, but you can't receive them, so you can't sell your own work. It's really limiting for all countries in this position (Chad, Marshall Islands, Republic of Congo...). Imagine We just published a children's book authored in Rwanda, but for the time being, their market is limited to Rwanda, unless international buyers wish to faff about with Western Union, bank transfers, and all the extortionate charges those carry. Hopefully this is a situation that will change soon.

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