Your 2009 IYPEY winner is...
Arthur Attwell, studied at the University of Cape Town, where he majored in English Literature and Latin and completed an MA in Creative Writing. In 1998 he joined Oxford University Press in Cape Town and, in 2002, Oxford. Upon his return to South Africa he worked as a senior publisher at Maskew Miller Longman, a Pearson company. In 2005 he left big publishing to start a new venture, which in 2006 became Electric Book Works (electricbookworks.com), a company specialising in applying innovative technology to traditional publishing.
As managing director of EBW, Arthur has initiated and overseen a wide range of publishing projects and research, including services for large and small publishers, the publication of two acclaimed children's books, the publication of EBW's flagship EBW Healthcare series (ebwhealthcare.com), and the development of Mousehand (mousehand.co.za), EBW's self- and small-scale publishing service, which produces and distributes books and ebooks locally and internationally for a range of new and established authors.
In addition to his day-to-day role at EBW, Arthur's current work focuses on research and consulting on print-on-demand and ebooks, and on developing new ways to deliver content in developing countries.
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| “I co-founded Electric Book Works in 2006 with three partner members. (These members lend their expertise from time to time, but otherwise do not work for EBW). We now have four permanent staff and work with a range of highly skilled freelance contractors. We work in four areas: |
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Our own publishing, which comprises mostly our EBW Healthcare series |
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Our Mousehand service, providing production and distribution services to self - and small-scale publishers |
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Production and consulting services to established publishing companies, focusing on digital publishing |
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Research and development of new concepts and models around digital-publishing |
As Managing Director of Electric Book Works, I am responsible for the day-to-day running of the company and its overall strategy. I’ll outline my specific roles in each of our business areas below.
EBW Healthcare is both a series of books and a way to help healthcare workers (mostly nurses) improve their own skills. The courses are based on the idea that healthcare workers can and want to take charge of their own learning.
Most conventional healthcare training is done in two ways: either a teacher travels to groups of healthcare workers to present training sessions, or healthcare workers have to travel to teaching venues for courses. Both methods are expensive and their effectiveness highly variable. Our system, developed over many years by our partner the Perinital Education Trust (PET), provides step-by-step learning material to healthcare workers to use in running their own learning programmes, either individually or in groups. This enables healthcare workers to learn at their own pace in ways that suit them, motivated by their own empowerment and by working in their own groups. Research by PET over the last several has shown that this method of teaching is highly effective at improving knowledge, clinical skills, attitudes and standard of healthcare, and it is immeasurably cheaper than conventional training methods. We now also work with the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation to produce books on HIV care in the series.
So far we have published 8 books, and have at least 7 planned for the next two years.
We publish the books in the series in print, and provide their content for free online in both PDF and browsable HTML forms. Website visitors can contribute comments on any part of the content on the website, both as a contribution to others and as feedback towards the further development of the books. These comments are moderated by the series editor Prof David Woods.
The free online versions of our books include all the content except for the self-monitoring practice tests at the end of each book. These tests are made available for a small fee, along with access to an electronic exam to write at the end of the course. Thus our business model is based not on selling content (this is essentially free), but on selling the services of having a printed book or writing practice tests and exams."
For more information please e-mail us or call on +27 (0)11 718 4318 during office hours.
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