Arab authors let down by lack of distribution

Keach Hagey

• Last Updated: March 21. 2009 8:30AM UAE / March 21. 2009 4:30AM GMT

Bachar Chebaro, the secretary general of the Arab Publishers Association, sees challenges for Arabic-language authors. Andrew Henderson / The National

Do not quit your day job.

That, in essence, was the message that Bachar Chebaro, the secretary general of the Arab Publishers Association, had for Arabic-language authors during his talk at this week’s Abu Dhabi International Book Fair.

He said the volumes of books published in the Middle East and North Africa would probably continue to be too low to pay authors’ rents until better data and distribution networks become available for the region.

“Arab publishers put out 1,000 to 2,000 books” a year, he said, speaking through a translator.

“They used to put out 3,000 to 4,000. We as publishers do not pretend to say that writers in the Arab world should live only on their writing ... They can’t make ends meet.”

The main problem forcing the region’s authors to take up up others careers,often including journalism, is the lack of a distribution network, he said.

Although there are 340 million people living in the Middle East and North Africa and an additional 442m Arabic speakers living outside the region, there is currently no way of selling an Arabic-language title to all of them at once.

“There are no pan-Arab or local book distribution companies. There are no companies specialised in GCC, Middle East or North Africa. We have no mega-distributors.”

As a result, members of the 12 Arab publishing syndicates that make up the Arab Publishers Association rely heavily on book fairs to sell their wares.

A related problem is the lack of data about how many books are published and sold.

“Unfortunately, all Arab publishers do not adopt the ISBN system,” he said, referring to the International Standard Book Number system, which assigns unique 10-digit numbers to books so publishers can track who is buying them, say libraries or universities, so they can market their products more efficiently.

“There are no accurate statistics in the publishing industry in the Arab world.”

As a result, the number of books published annually in the Arab world appears to be very low – in his accounting, lower than the number of books published annually in Greece.

To illustrate, he pulled some figures off neewlafurat.com, the largest online Arabic bookstore. They showed that there were 2,310 books from Egypt sold in 2008, down from 2,960 in 2007 and 3,106 in 2006.

In Lebanon, which competes with Egypt for the title of capital of the region’s publishing industry, there were 333 books published last year, compared with 4,165 in 2007 and 3,121 in 2006.

A third dimension of the problem is piracy, which particularly affects the academic book market.

“There is a network of book pirates who co-oprerate to print and distribute books, academic books mainly,” he said. “This is one reason for the weak distribution.”

Kitab, the joint venture between the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (Adach) and the Frankfurt Book Fair that sponsors the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, has made fighting piracy a top priority, conducting education programmes about copyrights and offering subsidies to publishers who buy foreign book rights at the fair.

Mr Chebaro also saw several other reasons for optimism in the UAE. He cheered the efforts of the Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation and Kalima, an initiative of Adach, to translate several hundred books between them in the past year.

“There are promises that these initiatives will be doubled in 2009,” he said. “The UAE is ambitious to be very present in the Arab world.”

He also cheered the recent addition of the UAE Publishers Association to the Arab Publishers Association, in advance of Abu Dhabi’s hosting a major copyright conference of the International Publishers Association next year.

But in some ways he saw Arab publishing’s greatest friend to be globalisation. The increasing intermixing of the world’s markets has created a new demand for fiction, children’s books and philosophical writing. “In the last decade, translation was based on academic books, because universities needed them,” he said. “But with globalisation, translation has started to move to a different phase. There is more importance given to the novel.”

Globalisation, combined with the internet, has also helped to roll back censorship in the region, he said, which the Arab Publishers Association opposed “in all its colours”.

khagey@thenational.ae