Chapter Zero
More local children and teenager’s storybooks are being published, but they face many challenges, writes OBODO EJIRO.
I want that one. No, not that one, I want the one with the picture of a King on its cover,” says a teenage girl, as she stoops over a pack of short storybooks under the Ojuelegba Bridge in Lagos.
In recent times, short storybooks, written and printed in Nigeria, have being making a strong comeback. They are published with beautifully designed covers and sold either at bookshops or by vendors at busy commercial layouts. Their popularity and patronage has become stronger.
And in this particular case, as the teenage girl flips over the bastard title page of the storybook she has chosen, she nods to affirm that her expectation has been met, hands a N200 note to the vendor and walks away smiling.
“They already know the prices,” the vendor, a tall svelte lady says, when asked about why the girl did not bargain before making payment. “I sell between 10 and 50 copies daily, depending on how good business is on a particular day.” As more titles are released, more copies are sold. “The returns are good too,” she adds as she shyly answers a question about how profitable the business is.
Sellers make as much as between 35-100 percent profit on each sale, albeit what really matters is the number of copies they sell, since prices are low. The buyers are many thus making it possible for sellers to sell many copies daily.
“Sometimes, I sell as many as seven copies to just one customer” one of the sellers affirms. The list of buyers includes children, youth, teachers, and parents.
“I bought four copies for my children earlier this week” says Ben Ighodalo, a parent, who has taught English language for almost one and half decades.
“I am particularly interested in them because they serve as some kind of supplementary reading texts to my children” says Ighodalo. “The quality of English is good and they can be easily comprehended by children of a certain age, apart from this, the books helps children build their vocabulary as well as improve their ability to comprehend short texts.”
The short storybooks may not be recommended texts at schools, but they go a long way at educating children. They come with many titles: “The invincible bride,” “My Dear Mother,” “Before I was born,” “A jolly holiday,” among others.
In terms of content, the books tell stories reminiscent of African folklore: often pitching a villain against a community or individual. In the end, the villain is defeated and lessons are learnt. Negative implications of vices are highlighted. The stories are geared at social engineer.
Unlike the 273 titles which made up the popular African Writers Series published by Heinemann in the early 1970s or 130 titles of the Pace setters series, published by Macmillan at about the same period, these new brand of storybooks are shorter, more accessible and can be read by children and youths of different age brackets. Parents particularly use them to engage their children.
“The books are cheap, easy to read, short and handy, they present an alternative to foreign books which are often more expensive and are harder to finds, says Ayo Dosumu, a parent. “It is easy to give a copy to your child and give him a target to finish reading it within a short period,” he adds. On the part of the children, just chronicling the titles they have read and getting to read even more titles is simply exhilarating.
But there are concerns and constraints which the publishers of the books face. Most of their books have no patent, piracy is a big problem. While on the consumer side, a good number of parents do not read before handing the books to their children.
A running battle with piracy
There are over 200 different authors and publishers that keep the market for short storybooks supplied. All of them complain about an inability to enforce intellectual property rights.
“We can register short storybooks if the authors come to us for such services, it costs N10,000,” a spokes person from the Nigeria Copyright Commission says. “But if there are cases of piracy, the author has to sludge it out in court with the pirate.” But the authors want more from the copyright commission.
“We record serious cases of piracy, especially in the northern part of the country,” says Samson Ugwu, an author and publisher. “We once had a case where someone reproduced some of our books and was marketing them in Abuja. In such cases, there is not much we can do than try to stop them.”
Book piracy in Nigeria is not restricted to short storybook. In an interview with The Tribune, a local newspaper, in 2011, Gbenro Adegbola, managing director of First Veritas Educational Content Delivery Limited, said “piracy is a huge problem that faces the publishing industry….When we talk of piracy; we are talking of wholesale reproduction by way of printing of our books by a few young boys who are traders.
“They contribute money and go to South-East Asia to print our books in large quantity, and because of the advancement in technology, it is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between the original and the pirated copies.”
Responding to questions bothering on whether things have changed between 2011 and 2015, Adegbola says, “quite frankly, its difficult to say things have changed in the intervening time. What may have changed is the fact that the market has certainly grown which probably makes the effect of piracy less on publishers….pirates typically operate on the fringes.”
But apart from the publishers, there is concern in some quarters that parents do not take the time to read and ascertain if the philosophies underlining the books they hand over to their children meet their own requirements.
Betsy Hearne and Deborah Stevenson in their book “Choosing Books for Children: A Commonsense Guide” have proffered some useful tips for parents. The pair believes that books which are not reviewed by educational boards should first be vetted by parents before they are handed over to children. They also make some other useful recommendations.
For adolescents above 12, they prescribe books about subjects that interest the child, novels that might help the child cope with daily challenges of growing up by featuring characters dealing with similar experiences, books that introduce new experiences and opportunities, fact books, such as world record books, trivia books, and almanacs, biographies, classics, folk tales, historical fiction, and mythology.
For young readers (aged 6-11) they prescribe clear texts that are easy to read, colorful, attractive illustrations and photos that bring the text to life and give clues to the meaning of unfamiliar words, books with the child’s favorite characters, stories the child enjoyed hearing when he or she was younger. They have other prescriptions for even younger children.
The children’s storybook market is big in Nigeria. Though the market is concentrated in the urban centers, Nigeria has some 70 million people under age 15. Those in this age bracket account for about 45 per cent of the country’s population, according to UNICEF. With fertility rate as high as 5.7 percent and population growth rate as high as 3.2 percent, there is little doubt that the market for short book will remain viable.
It is interesting to note that those who write the new brand of children’s’ storybooks are young graduate Nigerians who saw an opportunity in writing and took it.