Ayodele Arigbabu: The Future of Social Media and Publishing

Ayodele Arigbabu is the publisher, DADA Books. In this interview, he shares some really interesting futuristic ideas on publishing and social media which go beyond now. Get ready for social media and publishing, the sci-fi version, Arigbabu's version. 

Publishing goes digital

The things that I see, many of them are not here yet. Just me, imagining. It is possible for me to design some things and post a digital file on my website and different people around the world can download and print on a million different machines around the world. I am interested in seeing what the implication of that will be. It will come back to being able to print the book in bulk; it may not be in the same way that we know the book to be today. Or it might be. But what if, it is possible to just do a digital file for a book?

What if the model changes so much and it does not matter if it is being pirated because the more popular it is, the more money you make. What if that model that works for blogs, also works for books, what if the model changes so much, as such the more people that download your book, the more money you make. The more popular it gets, the more money you make somehow. For example, Google ads, what if what you print carries ads and the more you print, the ads are synchronises somehow because the more people print it, the more they can make money from it. So, that means that you are now going to make money from people pirating your book, so to say.

Whoever comes up with that idea, it will change the game of publishing. There will just be no point selling; imagine someone locking up a blog and saying that you need some access code before you read, unless there is a serious need for it and then, the person won't make that much money. If this happens t traditional publishing, there will be a pyramid: a few people at the top,  a few more people in the middle, and lots more people below.

Why are Nigerian programmers not tapping into the opportunities in the publishing sector?

There is a potential of technology. If you work with programmers, you will understand what is going on, many of them are doing copy and paste and they are not entrepreneurial. It is hard work. I can also understand why they are like that: this place is not like that place. So, to code for six months at a stretch, he will use his small generator, when there is no power; if your father is not rich, you have to fuel your gen yourself. I am sure that after the first month, you will ask yourself serious questions. Before long, you are tempted to take on the next job; you can only do one project at a time. The environment does not create that space for them to work.  These guys are usually about cash and carry and it usually affects the quality of their skills, and they keep building replicative things that are easier to make, they don't code for innovative stuffs.

The hologram and publishing

The first game changer is the printing idea but the real game changer is the hologram. What we have right now with the Kindle and all that is that you must have the device, you must be on one ecosystem or the other but the beauty of the traditional book is that you can take it anywhere and everywhere, you don't need to be on any platform before you can read your book; you just buy it. You can carry it anywhere to read so that's where the holographic book comes in: you don't need a device to read and you don't need an object. You need a device but you are interfacing with the book, not as a device but as a hologram.

The hologram projects an object that is just a manipulation of light. You are just seeing something that looks like a book but it responds to your touch. Meaning that you can flip it as you read; everything that you do on your device you can still do with the hologram. Maybe your device can be small and you don't need to carry something bulky. Once you have that, it means that your films, your music can also be on it. It is like carrying a flash drive that contains all your files. You can beam it on the wall and read. That's the one I look forward to. 

I know they do holograms of people. Like at teleconferences, a hologram will appear at the other end, and talk, instead of just seeing the person's face. Though it is still in the early stages. They did a Tupac show with Tupac on stage, where he was performing and interacting with the other performers on stage. However, it was just an actor somewhere, they did a 3D model of Tupac; the actor wore the motion capture stuff, they had rehearsed it perfectly, so he was doing his own thing somewhere and it was hologrammed on stage.

The Challenge

The problem is that I think up these things before they happen because I don't have the money to make it happen. So many of them. When I look at the trends in technology, I see where the logical end could be and the way it is, maybe somebody would have done that calculation, five years ago before me and the person has the capacity to do the coding and put a team together. We are working on all those things as well.

--The interview was sent in by Temitayo Olofinlua

The Voice Interviews: Ayodele Arigbabu

What are your fondest memories of childhood?

Chasing lizards in the backyard and getting lost in the fantasy world of comic books. I am the son of a brain surgeon. There are insinuations that he must have performed some experiments on my brain while I was a kid . . . either way, I have no proof, so I’m keeping an open mind.

What happened to the reading culture in Nigeria?

The reading culture never really went anywhere. Perhaps it’s the publishing culture that took a dip after Nigerians inherited the publishing houses from the colonials who founded them or perhaps Nigerians just found alternative reading material since publishers weren’t producing for them anymore. Nigerians have always read and will continue to read.

Why did you start DADA stores?

I’ve always been interested in retail and finding myself in publishing where I’ve found the supply end to be the real problem, I decided to experiment with a long-held idea for a media store. The real catalyst was having my wife come home from India with amazingly cheap personal items and fashion accessories, and we decided to do an interesting mix and have a test run for DADA stores. We ended up being satisfied with how much we sold.

What books did you read as a child?

I grew up on the same kind of stuff that people of my generation grew up on--comic books, the Peter and Jane, Famous Five, Secret Seven, Three Investigators, Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and Indiana Jones series. Then the more gritty James Hadley Chase and Nick Carter series. Of course the Pacesetters and African Writers series formed part of my literary education too. I got to read lots of Nigerian authors published by publishers like Onibonoje (I love that name), Heinemann and others because I had an aunt who worked with the ministry of education and always sent me box-loads of books to read. I think the final unhinging happened while I served as Librarian of the Pen Circle, a literary association we ran as students of the University of Lagos, and we got a donation of over 250 titles from the British Council Library and the books were in my custody for a while. I read my heart out to say the least.

On reading culture again: what was different when you were growing compared to now?

I would say the access to books. I don’t know if I was just lucky in finding books around me all the time, but now, sometimes even I have to struggle to fork out the money to buy the books I’m interested in--this is one reason why I always try to make our books, DADA Books, affordable. The internet is changing the game gradually though, because now, you can access millions of books on a gadget as accessible as your mobile phone. The question is whether Nigerian publishers would be ready to exploit this shift as quickly as possible because with the convergence of different media on the digital front. All that talk about reading culture is soon going to be glib, and the real question will be: ‘how proactive is our publishing culture?’

How do you encourage people to read through your efforts there?

At DADA stores, we’ve taken books from publishing houses that we feel share our brand ethos together with our books, and we are working at stocking up on choice music and film content as well so that we’ll be offering a one-stop fun-shop. We started with the notion that even if other things attract people to the store, there is a strong likelihood that they will pick up books because of the way we market them, and we buttress this by holding regular book events at the CORA House at 95 Bode Thomas, Surulere, where our store is located, not just to sell our books, but also to give the literary crowd in Lagos a cool hangout spot on the mainland. It’s a work in progress, but that’s the general idea.

What projects have you been involved in that encourage reading in Nigeria?

The Lagos Book & Art Festival organized by the Committee For Relevant Art. It’s an amazing model built on the simple thought that literature should be firmly promoted within the broader context of arts and culture, so at the festival, you have book stands and book readings, live music performances and theatre presentations, crafts workshops and craft displays, art exhibitions and discussions, all aimed at promoting literacy and the joy of reading. It’s a festival in the real sense of it. I’ve been actively involved in the planning of the festival since 2002 and have always found it to be a refreshing highpoint for every year since then. Recently, I’ve been running creative writing classes for children at the Garden CityLiterary Festival in Port Harcourt, and I must say I always look forward to being awed by the creativity of the kids. I also collaborate with different organizations on their projects and on projects initiated by DADA for various book readings, creative writing workshops, and other such activities.

What do you think is the biggest challenge to promoting a vibrant reading culture in Nigeria?

I’d say the publishing sector. The sector definitely needs to get organized and get imaginative. It is currently not a publishers’ market, it is the education sector’s market because if the education ministries stop recommending books by Nigerian publishers for Nigerian schools, many publishing houses would fold up, which is really sad because if publishers sold to a mass market as they should, then books should sell like MTN recharge cards, like Omo detergent and Gala beef rolls, not because some civil servant made them compulsory for students or housewives, but because the inherent value in books had been marketed to people successfully and they were exercising their choice out of the sheer pleasure of reading. Talking about the poverty matrix, look at beer, people celebrate in times of plenty by consuming alcohol, yet when in depression, they still drink to lift their spirits. There is no way you can tell me people in this country are too poor to buy books when they’ve made the telecoms sector rival the oil and gas sector for profitability in just one decade. The people are not too poor to buy books, the publishers have just not touched them in the right spots to make that critical decision to spend less time and money talking on MTN and spend more on DADA books. Believe me, our core competition is MTN.

What’s the major challenge you face as a publisher?

The greatest challenge used to be about the lack of an effective distribution network, but currently, with the benefit of experience, I’m able to say, it’s all about the cheddars baby! Give me enough money and I’ll build me an effective distribution system. Right across this country. MTN did it (yes, I’ve mentioned them again), Dangote did it, the oil companies are still doing it. But everybody does it with money. In the publishing industry however, we seem to keep up this inbreeding thing, a few of us will sell a few books to a few of us in Lagos and then fly to Abuja to sell a few more books to a few more of us in Abuja and feel fulfilled afterwards . . . it’s not because we don’t have megalomaniac tendencies to take on the whole African continent, it’s because we don’t have the war chest to make this happen. How can this be corrected? Fewer people should call my phone telling me about some amazing manuscript they want to publish, I admit that I meet truly fantastic people and their great writing through these enquiries, but more people should call about wanting to sink a few million dollars into a publishing initiative. Yes I’m calling everyone out, this thing takes money, let’s find us some serious money first, and then let’s talk business.

Why did you decide to publish the first DADA book?

My days with the Pen Circle at the University of Lagoshad really sharpened my interest in publishing and from 2006, I had started conceiving DADA as a platform for bringing all my interests together under one umbrella. The first DADA book was supposed to be my own book, A Fistful ofTales. I find it very interesting that one of the first people I shared the idea with was Jumoke Verissimo, she was interviewing writers for The Guardianthen and I still have the pull-out of the edition where she got me to talk about the forthcoming book. It turned out that Jumoke’s poetry collection I am Memory was published as the first DADA book in November 2008, then came Onyeka Nwelue’s The Abyssinian Boy in January 2009. A Fistful of Tales only came later in September 2009. On publishing myself, while it does feel weird engaging in self-promotion at that level, being published by one of the coolest imprints on the planet (*wink*) makes up for all that, besides, I think my writing was tailor-made for DADA . . . how many other imprints can handle the kind of stuff I turn out? I don’t know how else to put it without sounding more cocky than I already do.

How can the Nigerian publishing industry grow?

With some serious lateral thinking. Notice that I’m not saying anything that sounds like ‘government must do this’ or ‘government must do that.’ People need to get organized and then government would fall in line behind them, not the other way round. I must credit Farafinafor shining a torch in the darkness, if there had not been a Farafina, there would never have been DADA Books, or at least not as we know it today. They showed an inkling of what was possible and have continued to play a leadership role in expanding the possibilities. People should study the Farafina model and then decide for themselves what should and shouldn’t be done.

What should be done differently in local publishing?

We should go digital, I mean we should really take charge of the digital space. The internet scam artists aka Yahoo boys have done it successfully, blanketing the internet with their spam emails, and if they can go viral with their internet ‘publishing’ with little education and zero infrastructure, then there is nothing stopping Nigeria’s literati from legitimately taking charge of cyberspace. It’s happening in some fashion already, but to paraphrase Marcus Garvey: to really effect a revolution, there’s no other way to do it but to get organized.

What advice do you have for anyone thinking of going into publishing as a career?

I don’t have any advice to give, just a very pertinent question: Are you sure you really want to do that? If the answer is yes and you have actually taken time to meditate over all the attendant issues, then go for it, but if you waver for even a fraction of a second over an answer, just take it easy on yourself and go into oil and gas or something. Life really doesn’t have to be so hard.

Interviewed by Temitayo Olofinlua.

Favourite Five: Ayodele Arigbabu

*This is the first of a new feature that we plan to run regularly on this blog. In Favourite Five we simply ask a selection of book lovers to list their five favourite book titles.*

Ayodele Arigbabu is the publisher of DADA Books and the author of A Fistful of Tales. Ayo is a regular at the Garden City Literary Festival, where he has for several years coordinated creative writing classes for children. (We will feature a long interview with Ayo Arigbabu tomorrow, and he is also sending us pictures from the Hay Festival.)

Ayo had this to say about his Favourite Five: "I’m bad at this sort of question because I’m such a generalist and I think it’s unfair to have to choose between any of your favourites . . ."