With the aid of the Nigeria Copyright Commission, NCC, 8 persons were arrested and over 30 containers of pirated books confiscated in the commercial city of Aba, Abia State.
The Nigeria Publishers Association disclosed this in a press conference to mark this year’s World Book Day in Enugu.
It identified piracy as a cankerworm affecting the industry just as it identified the Aba raid as one of the biggest in the history of piracy in the country.
Chairman-in-council of NPA, Chief Uchenna Anioke noted that these books are printed in China at much cheaper rates due to government policies, and imported into Nigeria.
He called on the Federal Government to initiate policies that would check piracy and as well enhance the reading culture in Nigeria for improved economic development.
The policy he suggested should include copyright and piracy education in secondary school curriculum warning that without books the quest for knowledge and education would go into extinction.
He identified some of the constraints confronting the book industry in Nigeria to include illiteracy, finance, poor reading culture, government policy, infrastructural decay.
He said, “Countries with high level of literacy and thereby with high number of readers are economically, socially and politically more viable than non-reading countries.
“Books play vital roles in national development. However, there are some huddles, constraints just confronting the book industry that tend to dwarf it’s ability in performing these role.
“Moreover, publishers are of the view that finance is a factor militating against book publishing as publishing is capital intensive and because of the shaky wacky nature of the Nigerian economy, most banks consider it extremely risky to extend loan benefits to publishers.”
He however, suggested that despite the challenges encountered in publishing books, the association had moved on to introduce dual publishing which includes, digital publishing with traditional publishing method to meet the local peculiarities.