Theatre without borders: Evaluating e-book publication of play texts in the Nigerian educational space

Abstract

The theatre ecology had embraced digital technology long before the Covid-19 pandemic entered our lives. The orange economy, as we know it, is driven by creativity from the arts and humanities as well as the sciences. Playwriting pedagogy, as was traditionally taught, pointed to the stage, printing press and elitist publishers as windows to the world. The theatre arts is a discipline that has a value chain of products and services. Adopting the survey and historical-analytic methods, this paper focuses on playwriting and the playwrightpreneur’s options to the conventional style of publishing for product spread and economic empowerment. The excitement and apprehensions of digitisation on this venture are interrogated via an online survey on consumers of play texts, on the one hand, and playwrights on the other hand. The researcher argues that the availability of online stores does not necessarily translate to the availability of e-books. The results show that even though we are in the digital era, the acceptability of e-books is low compared to hard- copy books. It also reveals that knowledge of online publishing is poor. The gains of digitising theatre projects are illuminated. Furthermore, teachers and students of theatre arts studies will find this option complementary to the age-long style of hard copy inventories as institutional or personal collections. The paper concludes that adequate information on how to publish play texts online is urgently needed especially for writers of dramatic texts. It recommends that workshops on online publication be organised for teachers and students of playwriting.