OkadaBooks

» see okadabooks.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Okechukwu Ofili was writing for BellaNaija and YNaija and selling his own books through Nigerian bookshops, and the bookshops were not paying him for copies they had already sold. That is the grievance the whole company came out of. Traditional publishing in Nigeria meant a contract you would not like, and self-publishing meant paying print costs up front for stock you then had to chase money on.

The name came from a dream about hitching a ride on an okada, the motorcycle taxi that gets through Lagos by going around the jam rather than sitting in it. Ofili's read was that distribution was the jam. A book on a phone needs no truck and no shelf, and it does not depend on a shop owner's honesty.

OkadaBooks launched in 2013 as a mobile-first store and self-publishing tool in one. Anyone could upload, and the platform took thirty percent against the author's seventy. Listings settled at prices a Nigerian reader would actually pay, commonly between 250 and 500 naira. It won MTN Nigeria's Best Overall App award in its first year and was picked for Google's Launchpad Accelerator Africa cohort in 2017.

~ the record ~

~ two hundred naira ~

By the end there were more than 40,000 original titles on it and something like 400,000 registered readers, and over eight thousand people had published a book for free who otherwise would not have published one at all. A fair number of Nigerian writers with real followings now had their first release on OkadaBooks, which is the part the tributes kept returning to after it closed.

Almost none of this was legible from outside West Africa. The catalog was in English, so language was never the barrier; the barrier was that a Lagos platform pricing books in naira for readers on Nigerian mobile data has no reason to appear anywhere in a Turkish search result, and it never did. I found out this thing had existed by reading about its funeral.

~ ten days notice ~

The announcement went out on 20 November 2023 and set the closing date at 30 November. Ten days. Ofili's line was that they had explored various avenues to keep the virtual bookshelves alive and the challenges were insurmountable, which in Nigeria that year was not a euphemism for anything. Fuel subsidy had gone in May and the naira had been floated in June, and across the months that followed the currency lost most of its dollar value. A business built on selling digital goods at 250 naira a copy does not have anywhere to move when the number under the currency collapses.

Ten years and no successor. Readers with a decade of purchases behind them had an account that stopped opening at the end of the month.

~ the roulette site ~

okadabooks.com is still registered and still resolves. It answers with a 301 to roletonline.cc, a domain whose name is Portuguese for online roulette and whose 93 KB of content is a Vietnamese sports betting brand called F8BET, page language set to vi, titled for September 2026. Somebody bought the address for whatever traffic it still carries and pointed it three countries away from anything it used to mean. A Nigerian reader typing okadabooks.com out of habit gets a login page for a bookmaker they cannot read.

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