Company description

This description of Electric Book Works is for administrative purposes. For example, it is useful to tax authorities or new freelancers working with us. It focuses on concrete details to provide a picture of what we do day to day. It is not for promotional purposes, and doesn’t try to capture intangible qualities like the trust we build with clients and partners, our values, or the spirit in which we do our work.

Electric Book Works (Pty) Ltd is a company registered in South Africa. It was founded in 2006 as a closed corporation (CC), and became a company solely owned by Arthur Attwell in 2010.

We have a team of about seven full-time staff members. They include project managers, editors, designers, and software developers. Most of our team members are based in or near Cape Town, South Africa. We work remotely and meet regularly. We also bring in specialist freelancers on a project-by-project basis.

EBW provides publishing services to its clients, who are usually organisations. Our clients pay us fees for work done, usually on the basis of up-front quotations, along with written descriptions of project scope.

EBW specialises in the editing, design, and layout of publications that are simultaneously websites, print books, and ebooks. In addition, we often provide consulting services on strategy, in areas such as distribution, user-experience, revenue models, licensing, and search-engine optimisation.

For example, a non-profit organisation might hire us to edit and design a textbook that is published both as a free website and as a printed book you can buy on Amazon. Or a business might hire us to turn their old printed training manual into an interactive web app and an offline ebook.

Our team’s ability to produce all of these formats at the same time, to a world-class standard, is our main differentiator. Most agencies specialise in either print design or web development, but not both. There are very few agencies in the world able to do what we do.

Most of our clients are based abroad, in countries that include the UK, USA, Switzerland, India, Canada, France, New Zealand, and the Netherlands.

We tend to work on projects that have a positive social impact. We created open-source publishing software that others can use for free. And two independent non-profit organisations began as EBW projects: children’s book publisher Book Dash and healthcare publisher Bettercare.

Over the years, our people and projects have won several awards in South Africa and abroad, mostly for innovation in publishing.