In addition to stores selling e-books, there are also private, non-commercial digital publishing projects, such as Nashiri, which launched its activities in 2003. This site, founded by Hayat Alyaqout, a young Kuwaiti woman, combines a free electronic library with a digital book publishing company. Not long after its appearance, it already offered over 120 e-books, 2000 articles and more than 100 writers from various countries. The portal currently receives around 200,000 hits per year, from across the Arab world, from Morocco to Oman.[1]

In 2005, Hayat Alyaqout also founded I-Mag, a free digital magazine that until 2008 was published quarterly in Flash, HTML and PDF format, with the aim of presenting different aspects of Islam to a mainly English-speaking public. When asked why the magazine’s slogan was “Enlighten Your I”, Alyaqout gave an unexpected explanation:

By ‘I’ we mean yourself, and we also mean your ‘eye’, because we do have several sections that deal with art and photography.[2]

The magazine has now been discontinued due to lack of funds and the instability caused by depending on voluntary collaborations.[3]