The online store, which Arunga described as “Amazon for Africa, with fewer payment options,” has now sold a thousand books in Kenya and beyond—a relative handful, but, to Williams, a meaningful start. In order to support a full-time employee, he said, the store only needs to sell fifty books a day. And if that happens it could serve as a proof of concept for literary entrepreneurship in the developing world.

Brendan Fitzgerald considers, and questions, the taxonomy: “such labels sometimes reward the writer, who becomes associated with a popular movement. They sometimes reward the reader, who has a new word for what she seeks. … Whether labels like ‘longform’ reward a story is another matter.”

“I am a professional translator, having translated some 125 books from the French. One might therefore expect me to bristle at Google’s claim that its new translation engine is almost as good as a human translator, scoring 5.0 on a scale of 0 to 6, whereas humans average 5.1. But I’m also a PhD in mathematics who has developed software that ‘reads’ European newspapers in four languages and categorises the results by topic. So, rather than be defensive about the possibility of being replaced by a machine translator, I am aware of the remarkable feats of which machines are capable, and full of admiration for the technical complexity and virtuosity of Google’s work. My admiration does not blind me to the shortcomings of machine translation, however.”