IN BRIEF
01 Can you tell me your background and why you
decided to launch AkooBooks? And why the name Akoo? AkooBooks Audio is Ghana’s first publisher and digital distributor of African audiobooks. My parents instilled a love of reading in me at a very early age. My mother is a children’s book writer, and 10 years ago she began to lose her vision. Audiobooks became her lifeline and as her personal library of audiobooks grew, we realised that there were very few African books available for her to listen to. As a result, I started African Audio Publishers, a books-on- cassette tape service for distributing African books to the blind and visually impaired, and the seed for AkooBooks was sown. Much of Africa is experiencing
abysmally low levels of literacy, due to poor educational systems, collaps- ing book industries and bad reading culture. However, there is a hugely untapped opportunity to address these challenges. With Africa record- ing the highest penetration of the use of mobile phones, that is where the potential of audiobooks comes in. In November 2017, I founded
AkooBooks to publish and distribute digital African literature. Around 90% of African literature cannot be found in digital form. We provide African publishers and writers with the plat- form to transform their books, and reach as many people as possible. In an age where traditional booksellers continue to vanish, literature must adapt and take on new forms. And “Akoo” means “parrot” in Akan
language, which is spoken in Ghana, so AkooBooks are “talking books”.
02 Can you sketch out how the company is developing?
We offer recording and production, marketing and distribution, licens- ing, and other services for African authors, poets and storytellers in Ghana. We earn revenue on down- loads, and pay royalties to authors.
Q&A Ama Dadson
AMA DADSON WITH ELLIOT AGYARE, THE PRESIDENT OF GHANA’S PUBLISHERS ASSOCIATION
Ama Dadson AkooBooks, founder & c.e.o.
With a vast market for audio content in Africa, the founder of the only publisher and distributor of African audiobooks in West Africa is hoping to capitalise
Questions Tom Tivnan
We have a team of 15 professional narrators from Ghanian film and thea- tre on contracts, so imagine fantastic storytelling, read and interpreted by professional African actors, in our own languages. Our first audiobook, the anthol-
AMA DAWSON RIGHT AND HER TWIN AMBA MBOPE BIGG AT IPA LAGOS LAST YEAR
20 17th October 2019
ogy Kenkey for Ewes & Other Very Short Stories, was launched in April 2018 through our partner platform LibroFM. Since then we have negoti- ated more than 150 licences from African publishers and authors from across the continent, and in the UK and the US; struck a distribution agreement with
Youscribe.com to bring AkooBooks to readers in the five Francophone West African countries;
and released the beta version of our AkooBooks app for Android and iOS.
03 Obviously, audio is a huge growth area in North
Around 90% of African literature cannot be found in digital form. We provide African publishers and writers with the platform to transform their books Ama Dadson, AkooBooks
America and Europe. What is the market for it in Ghana, and Africa-wide? The market is wide open and huge as there are more than 474 million Africans online. However, in Africa e-books and digital audio are largely unavailable to consumers, and access to the digital book markets is unavailable to many African authors and publishers. The foray into digital is mainly e-books, with non-profit
Worldreader.org playing a major role in bringing books to nine million African readers, via mobile phones, since 2015. South Africa is the leader in
African audiobook publishing, with a handful of companies specialising in digital content and audiobooks for the South African market. East Africa has a few companies focused on low-cost access to digitised versions of all Kenyan textbooks and educational audiobooks. They also have a few new podcast companies and networks. In West Africa, AkooBooks is the
only publisher and distributor of African audiobooks, however there are a couple of Nigerian platforms for distribution of e-books. Some
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