Jane KatjaviviWindhoek

IT was encouraging to see Freddy Philander's article in Friday's New Era concerning the unit of ammunition tabular array treatment on independent publication in Republic Of Namibia held at Unam last week. However, I would wish to rectify some misconceptions in the article.

There is mention to New Republic Of Namibia Books as ascendant the text edition marketplace and being a multinational. Neither of these statements is true.

I established and ran the company from 1990 to 2000. The investing and hazard were all my own. I spoke about this experience at the unit of ammunition table, to seek to foreground the troubles of independent publication in our little market.

We did print two scientific discipline text edition series - a sum of seven books - a joint venture with the transnational publishing houses Heinemann, but they did not ain any portion of New Republic Of Namibia Books.

I chose to put income from gross sales of these texts into some 60 non-educational books - children's books, traditional stories, scholarly books, literature and life stories. Some of these had subsidies from giver federal agencies to cover printing costs, but the development costs were all borne by NNB.

Unfortunately, this proven not to be sustainable. Looking back, I can see that if I had made different column picks and focused on more than textbooks, the company might still be an independent entity.

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Last week's unit of ammunition tabular array treatment brought together educationalists, Ministry of Education officials, Unam staff, publishers, authors and information workers, and was a valuable forum to exchange thoughts about how to advance writing, reading and publication in Namibia. One of the chief subjects was that of investment.

As declared in your paper, Ottilie Abrahams spoke passionately in favor of supporting authors directly. However, there are also other countries where investing could assist to develop local authorship and publishing, such as as assisting independent publication houses with bonded low-interest loans, or a committedness to buying new authorship for school and public libraries, or working with educational publishing houses to guarantee that literature is published alongside textbooks.

The first measure towards any of these measures, however, is a general agreement that it is of import to develop local authorship and publication as a critical measure in the saving and development of culture. This general agreement have yet to be achieved.