Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology
School of Information Technology
Department of Information Science
Selected Highlights from Research Findings
The goal of the overarching project is to develop an accumulative database consisting of various profiles (including turnover, production, author, royalty, employment and ownership data) which can be utilized for the tracking, monitoring and measuring of changes across the book publishing value chain. The goal of the broad trends report is to identify growth or decline, and other trends, over a three year period. Findings, with reference to turnover, include: Between 2004 (R1,76b) and 2005 (R2,09b) there was a growth of 19% in the Total Net Turnover of the participants in the surveys; between 2005 and 2006 (R2,58b) there was a growth of 23%. In terms of the Gross Domestic Product this cultural industry is making a relatively significant contribution to the economy of the country: 0.126% during 2004; 0.136% during 2005; and 0.150% during 2006. If constant prices are used it increases further to 0.195% during 2006. Over the three years the book publishing industry has been growing at a rate far exceeding both inflation and the annual growth in Gross Domestic Product. This growth is driven by the production of local product, the import of overseas product, and other industry related activities. All three industry sub-sectors experienced significant growth in book sales turnover values over this period: educational, academic and professional, and trade. On average over the period, local books made up about 93% of total sales of educational books. The growth in the trade sub-sector was also driven by locally produced books, which increased by 16% (between 2004 and 2005) and 17% (between 2005 and 2006) in sales value respectively. The academic and professional sub-sector also manifested growth in the sales of locally produced books during this period.
Contact person: Dr FCJ Galloway.
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