Digital Canopi: Royards Publishing launches e-book platform

On December 3, Royards Publishing introduced its new online e-book platform, Digital Canopi.

The project began during the covid19 lockdown, explained Dwight Narinesingh, a second-generation director of the publishing company.

One of the most effective tools we have in this covid lockdown is technology," he said during the livestreamed launch.

"As the world goes digital, we have to adapt."

Royards has been in business for 35 years with 150 educational titles currently in print publication.

According to its website, the company was founded in 1984 in Trinidad and since then has served the Caribbean region extending to Belize, Bahamas, Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands. It produces curriculum material at both the primary and secondary levels.

"We need to be able to offer those textbooks to students and schools as e-book options," Narinesingh said.

"We are responding to the need for blended learning and digital shifts."

Sheldon Monderoy, chief technology officer of Blue Guruz, built the first phase of the project with an emphasis on efficiency and transparency for publishers.

Information for publishers and authors is immediately available on the backend of the service.

For users, getting a book from Digital Canopi is a familiar two-part exercise modelled on the Amazon Kindle method of e-book distribution.

Users create an account on the Digital Canopi website and browse the available books there.

There are currently 175 books available on the platform from 47 authors and the company is currently in talks with another 20 about hosting their books in digital format.

Books on the platform earn authors and publishers an 80 per cent royalty minus bank charges, withholding taxes and any ancillary fees. Digital Canopi takes 20 per cent for hosting and delivery.

Asked about the listing of books in US dollars and author payment, Narinesingh noted that: "Various settlement options were explored as the goal is to be accessible globally."

"For that reason, we have kept the currency to a constant US dollar. We are utilising the services of Stripe credit card processing in the US for secure transactions and the US dollar is the mandatory currency."

The company is currently in talks with Caribbean-based payment solutions companies to utilise their products for the local market.

"E-commerce platforms are impacted by the lack of harmonisation of e-commerce settlement systems within Caricom. The costs for processing different currencies within Caricom will be prohibitive for a small company and (specifically) in an environment where the company is trying to grow the market for e-books," Narinesingh said.

"Payment will be made at current exchange rates for local authors who do not possess a US account. For authors abroad, we shall make payments in US dollars from our collection bank in the US."

A purchase goes to the account of the user who then downloads the Digital Canopi app on a Windows, Android or iOS device.

After entering their account credentials, any purchased book appears in the app for viewing.

There are three formats that are widely used for creating electronic books. The most common and economical in size is the epub format, which uses custom markup code similar to that used for webpages to reproduce text and graphics.

Amazon's mobi format is a proprietary form of epub.

It's an excellent way to produce a lightweight reproduction of a text heavy book, but it fails spectacularly on design, reducing book design to a stream of text interspersed with image graphics.

The other format is PDF, which faithfully reproduces a book's design and can embed fonts to create a partially live version of a text. Both formats support hyperlinking.

For Digital Canopi, Royards and Blue Guruz went with an encrypted version of PDF that's only readable in the Digital Canopi app. That addresses the most common blight that assails digital books – widespread piracy – but creates a document that doesn't scale particularly well on smartphone screens.

It's not possible to test this beyond the sample of the book that's available for each title on the site, since books don't transfer to the app unless you purchase them.

In my own collection of e-books, when an option is available for PDF and epub, I'll often choose both, reading the more flexible epub version on the smartphone screen and switching to the more smartly designed PDF version on a tablet.

Several authors were pleased enough with their experience on the new e-book website to make a personal appearance to laud the effort.

Author Marsha Gomes-McKie, a local self-published author and illustrator who writes children's books, romance and folklore fantasy fiction and is the author of Soucou Yant, was one of the first authors to publish on Digital Canopi.

"My goal is to introduce the world to Caribbean tales and to tell our stories our way," McKie said, saluting Digital Canopi as "providing a much-needed platform for Caribbean writers."

"We need industry support to promote and sell these stories."

She was just joined on the livestream by children's book authors Shivani Ramoutar, Phillip Simon and Aarti Gosine, business advice writer Carol Anne Joseph, finance writer Asif Cassim, poet Katrina Khan-Roberts and columnist Tony Deyal.

In his explanation of the platform, Monderoy explained that bulk licensing for education is available on the platform and official documents and reference materials for business or government can also be distributed there using a private viewing option that masks the visibility of selected titles from general access.

For education, the tradition for e-books published for educational use has been a rental model, with books licensed for use for the duration of the term of school requirements, often at quite intimidating prices.

"In anticipation of the requirements of the education system," Narinesingh explained, "we have created a subscription module that offers the option of either purchasing a textbook outright, or purchasing a subscription of the textbook for a specified time at a lower cost."

"This is similar to a rental of the content. For example, a student needing a textbook for one school year can purchase a subscription for 280 days or nine months at a lower cost."

"Once the specified date is realised, the content is removed from the user's device. This is available to any publisher or author."

The examples on the Digital Canopi website don't offer any major savings for rentals, with price differences of between two and three dollars. These are Royards publications however, and other publishers may make a greater distinction between purchases and rentals.

I am also unable to report on how books that appear to have fields to be filled out, like mathematics problems in a textbook, perform in the app. In the samples I viewed on the website, these answer slots were not selectable.

But Digital Canopi is very much in its early stages of development, with digital rights management and audiobooks offerings to come in its next phase.

"We have been speaking with some regional and extra-regional publishers who have shown interest in placing their books and/or catalogues online," Narinesingh said.

As more authors begin to generate sales on Digital Canopi, it is hoped that this will attract publishers to place their titles."

"Digital Canopi is especially attractive for publishers with books/catalogues (that are) out of print or who are challenged with the high cost of physical distribution in markets where they may not have agents and/or distributors."

"Added to this we are mindful that the Caribbean publishing sector is struggling with the sale of physical books (outside of educational books)."

"This we hope will help to bring more titles to market and assist in growing the eco-system."