Ethiopia is losing an advantage of earning a currency from online book market

Nowadays, online book sale market is an enormous advantage of developed countries which has economical benefit to increase revenue. Online market platform such as Amazon.com and Kindling, Lulu.com and other multi-tasking world wide web marketing systems are providing treasured use for sellers and buyers all over the world. Among sellable ingredients, literary contributions of authors books, journals, and articles are mentionable.

Online marketing has helped those who are direct and indirect beneficiaries of the system and the product. Firstly, the owner of the web site earns the portion of the commission direct payment for its brokerage of virtual task; secondly the government earns its tax which can be expressed in millions of dollars or Birr, and thirdly our penurious writers and poets earns revenue based on their work quality and promotion.

Ethiopia, on its tax law, there is a clear legislation to pay tax for book selling from each publication. The amount of the tax that ought to be collected is 5 % of the total sale of each published book of the author. This means from 100,000 copies of books of 50-Birr cost of each the inland revenue collects 250,000.00 Birr from the author once from 5,000,000.00 sum of total sale. This amount of income might be seen as low value of money but its contribution is beyond that. The question might be how many of among authors pay the publishing tax in accordance of the rule mentioned in the inland revenue proclamation? And how many of authors are satisfactorily reach by earning the minus 250,000.00 Birr that is to say 4,750,000.00 -Birr on his live.

The amount of this value of sale is calculated as illustration if the sale of books is from printing product, not from online e-marketing. The government can predict with collecting relevant data about the quantity of paper back sales and e- book sales from reports of Amazon.com or Lulu.com or another e-marketing platform of Ethiopian authors. If proper promotion is done, the earning of inland revenue will be high.

For instance, as reported by Kimberly Reeves, Capitol reporter, Austin Business Journal, March 20, 2019, the Texas government aimed to add about $550 million in revenue to the books for the next two years with the passage of two bills that would collect sales tax from out-of-state online retailers like eBay and LL Bean.

The main focus of this writings is not to criticize the tax system and the authors negligence of paying taxes; however, it is to awake the government not to lose its fruits from its trees. The fruits are the learned, imagined and written treasuries; and the trees are its valuable writers and poets in this country who have been lived in publication darkness, seeing not the light yet. There works are being obsolete without any benefit to the society and for themselves. The reason of this problem is a shortage of money for payment to publish their books and to sell them. As a result, the society would be benefited.

In Ethiopia, the current telecommunication network and the bank system has connected to provide some service with each service’s specific features. For instance: Taxi services owners’ server with telecom switching center to establish direct calls and count their portion of revenue; and some connections which are working without ethio telecom data network such as Automatic transaction machine (ATM) of banks are facilitating the lives of citizens to make the money transaction easy. But, the online markets via internet servers are not applicable yet.

The benefit of online sale through internet network has looked forgotten by Ethiopian government. The government might be feared due to the international currency, not to disburse the dollar amount of sale outward. If a citizen, by being from a country from his or her bank account, by using credit card system pays for the purchase of books from Amazon.com via online marketing; the dollar amount will be paid to abroad. This reason might be the fear of the government which has emanated from economist’s perspective of using dollar through international market by being in Ethiopia. The other fear might be emanated from technologist’s perspective not to be hacked from abroad via internet network. But both stimulated fears of our government banned the economic use of e-marketing to our penurious authors and other selling agents.

The connection is so easy because once the telecommunications’ data network and all banks servers are digitalized since their invention. It is a matter of installing hardware and relevant software at each node; then making an agreement with notorious online sale companies to implement the service. Banks will start to issue credit cards to users and the online sale will be launched only by limiting the service to one direction if there is a will from government side.

A one direction connection means blocking the buying functions from abroad not to let the dollar amount to flow outward and allowing the selling function from the country to flow in to our banks the sold quantity of the dollar value. By this mechanism the Ethiopian government will be beneficiary because it is only to collects that dollars from online sales only by letting the swift code of each bank to be accessible from international e-marketers data system.

I am optimism to the future generation of Ethiopian authors; they will be benefited from international markets through e-marketing to change his or her life standard by selling books and other valuable materials from here. The government ought to allow the system to be launched by doing three main protocols.

The first is to prepare tax collecting system from online sale via internet network to be benefited from international e-market. The second is to train at higher-level network security personnel to safeguard bank servers not to be hacked via internet network.

The third is to allow inland transactions with the help of credit card to purchase and sell commodities and other materials at the beginning stage.

The Ethiopian Herald July 26, 2020

BY ALEMEYE GAMMO

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7 Comments to “Ethiopia is losing an advantage of earning a currency from online book market”

  1. nenarazili jste někdy na problémy s plagorismem nebo porušováním autorských práv? Moje webové stránky mají spoustu unikátního obsahu, který jsem vytvořil.

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