Nouvelles Editions Numériques Africaines (NENA) is the initiator, designer and project manager of the African Digital Library (ADB), a project mainly realized with own funds.
NENA is an African digital publishing company based in Senegal. A pioneer in its field, NENA has been publishing since 2008 eBooks mainly with African content and in all fields (law, social sciences, literature, youth, religion, etc.). ), in different formats (PDF, ePub, HTML, MP3), and on various media eBooks downloadable from most French-speaking digital bookstores on the Internet, libraries of digital books readable online, audiobooks, books printed on demand).
In carrying out the DBA NENA has given itself a new profession, that of digital bookseller, whose role is that of promoter, adviser and reseller of African books.
What is the African Digital Bookstore?The African Digital Bookstore is a digital platform dedicated to African books and more generally to African culture. It offers digital books, audiobooks, and print-on-demand books in both English and French and increasingly in national languages. All of these publications can be purchased online, or paid for offline by the usual means. As soon as they are paid for, they can be downloaded or, in the case of physical publications, they are shipped.
The works available on the ADB may be those of authors published directly by NENA. Or they are the result of digital co-publishing between NENA and other publishers, African or not, of African works, Or they are books published by publishers whose digital publications are distributed by NENA.
The common point of all these works is therefore that they all come, except for some belonging to the universal heritage of humanity, from Africans or people who have made a remarkable contribution to the knowledge and culture of Africa.
Why the African Digital Bookstore?By gathering all these works on the same site, the ADB is carrying out the first part of its mission, that of a universal dissemination of Africa's cultural heritage. Instead of having no other choice but to drown African cultural works in the mass of works available on other digital bookshops, this concentration of African cultural products, which the ADB achieves, makes it easier to find and access them worldwide.
A second part of the ADB's raison d'être is specifically linked to the digital nature of the publications distributed on the ADB. In recent years, the book industry has undergone a revolution comparable to that of the invention of the printing press: new electronic media, such as tablets, smart phones, eBook readers and computers, have made digital reading possible and predictable. With the richness of its cultural heritage, Africa must not remain on the sidelines of this innovation that is destined to last. By offering a concrete and practical solution to the dissemination of African digital books, the ADB wants to encourage African authors and publishers to go digital. From now on, they have no reason to hesitate to convert their past and current works into digital format, and to publish any new work in digital format, whether or not in parallel with the printed version.
Finally, the ADB is part of an activity which, in order to last, must also be economically viable. The ADB is an actor within the African publishing industry, with its authors, its publishers, its distributors, its diffusers, its booksellers, its libraries, its readers: an industry that is still modest, but determined and essential, because its mission is one of the noblest: to organize and disseminate by Africans themselves their own knowledge and works of the mind and imagination.
The ADB thus aims to contribute to the consolidation of the African publishing industry by giving it a boost in the transition to digital. By positioning itself at a strategic point, that of the universal distribution and retailing of African digital books and other cultural products, the ADB can become a common tool for the entire African publishing industry. While dissemination is the major headache of most African publishers in the field of printed books, this objection is no longer valid in the field of digital books: the ADB solves this issue by making possible today the universal, permanent and immediate dissemination of African digital books as soon as they are published. It thus strengthens the African publishing industry by enabling the valorisation of its past, present and future editorial stock.
Who are the partners of the LNA?The LNA continues to grow thanks to the contribution of the many NENA partners who join its project, first and foremost :
- the intellectual authors and publishers whose works are distributed here, and who are the real creators without whom such a project is impossible; to mention just one of them, the easiest way is to consult the authors' index on the bookshop;
- the African publishers who have accepted NENA's proposal of co-publishing or digital distribution and thus to be pioneers in African digital publishing: the Partners page on the ADB menu lists these publishers who we can only hope will complete the process of rallying their other colleagues in the industry; the LNA publishers' index allows to find the publications of each of them;
- the NENA professionals whose patient and meticulous work has made it possible to produce each page of each digital publication available on the ADB.