With 46.8 million internet users, Kenya is behind only Egypt and Nigeria in the African internet stakes, and by the way that means Kenya has more people online than Spain or Canada, and twice as many as Australia.

“The 24th edition of Kenya’s Nairobi International Book Fair this year adds a ‘Rights Café’ for business meetings and networking,” reports Publishing Perspectives, which has the latest on the Nairobi International Book Fair, this year running September 27 through October 1.

Nairobi has finally embraced the hybrid public-trade book fair model, with a big push from one of Africa’s premier digital publishing player, eKitabu.

#NIBF23 promises to be the best yet, with significant international participation showing that the world is waking up to this exciting east African book market.

Last year there was only one foreign exhibitor. This year China, India, Iran, South Africa, Uganda and Tanzania are among the international players.

The pre-event press conference included the bad news that Kenyan book publishers lose up to KES 300 million ($2 million) to piracy each year.

That of course pretty much all print-based piracy. Kenyan publishers might want to check out Carlo Carrenho‘s take on piracy and how digital can alleviate this particular menace.

Which neatly brings us to another new development for the Nairobi fair, in the form of the partnership with eKitabu and the African Publishers Network to host a rights pavilion. “Specially appointed NIBF ambassadors drawn from different countries in Africa, Europe, and the Americas, will be at hand to negotiate publishers and authors for the sale of their rights,” reports Kenya’s The Star.

eKitabu’s involvement a constant reminder of the digital potential for African publishing.

With 46.8 million internet users, Kenya is behind only Egypt and Nigeria in the African internet stakes, and by the way that means Kenya has more people online than Spain or Canada, and twice as many as Australia.

All told, there are 590 million people online across Africa, at a time when, per Kiarie Kamau, MKIM , Kenya Publishers Association chairman, “African books are still not well known beyond our borders.”

Digital is the key to enabling African content to reach not just the wider world, but also every country in Africa itself.

#NIBF23 promises to be a major step towards that becoming a reality.

Elsewhere on the continent, YouScribe has established itself as a major player in digital books streaming, with over a million subscribers on the continent, while Ama Dadson‘s Akoo Books is proving that audiobooks can be the next big thing for African publishing.

Meanwhile, with bitter irony, here in The Gambia, West Africa, internet and electricity issues keep me from covering #NIBF23 and other African publishing developments in the detail I’d like.

For more on the Nairobi fair, do head over to Publishing Perspectives.

And hopefully I can monitor #NIBF23 from afar and bring some further reportage as the event unfolds.

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