Throughout our website you’ll find many references to a website called African Storybook.

Our partners at African Storybook Project have created a fantastic online system for creating books in any language. According to their website,

“The African Storybook initiative aims to address the shortage of contextually appropriate books for early reading in the languages of Africa. Our vision is for all young African children to have enough enjoyable books to read in a familiar language to practise their reading skills and learn to love reading.

On the African Storybook website, users can find, create, translate or adapt stories for early reading. They can download and copy the stories and/or illustrations without having to ask for permission or pay a fee. The stories can be read online or offline or printed from the website.”

Their values and vision align well with those of Little Zebra Books, and so we are in the process of making all of our titles and languages freely accessible there. You can find our books on their website by searching for Little Zebra Books under “all storybooks”, or by looking at the collection of our English titles here.

Here’s how you can use African Storybook

With no account, you can:

  • Read books. All their books are easily readable on their website. You can search by language or by title and enjoy hundreds of books online.
  • Print books. You can download any of the books on African Storybook as a printable PDF, and print it yourself. They are formatted so that they look good when printed on a normal printer.

With a free account, you can:

  • Contribute stories and artwork. Note that you should only share images or stories if they are open source. Once they are shared on African Storybook, anyone is allowed to use that content free of charge.
  • Translate other people’s stories into your language. It is very easy to find books that you like in English or another language you understand, and then to translate them into your own language and publish them on the website so others can read your translation, or so that you can download a printable PDF of your translation.

We love African Storybook, and we hope you find it useful!