In the Arab world, as is the case in sub-Saharan Africa, in the Arab world digital publishing is highly incipient. The Arabic language represents a very powerful cohesive force, which may give rise to electronic platforms with transnational reach, but which at the same time – due to technical issues such as the treatment of fonts – [...]
Presentation
Technical data
Countries that make up the region: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syrian Arab Republic, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen. Population: 300,892,543 (2009) Urban population: 58% (2009) Macroeconomics: GDP: US$ 1,062,418,867,027 (2009) GDP per capita: US$ 3,597 (2009) Unemployment: 10.3% (2010) Politics: Political instability, ethnic [...]
A first approach: virtual stores
The first thing we find in the Arab world are some important online stores selling printed copies. One noteworthy example is NWF (Neelwafurat), whose very name reflects its intention to emulate Amazon, for just as the famous US brand alludes to the South American river, Neelwafurat refers to the Nile and the Euphrates. NWF was [...]
Non-profit portals
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, [...]
Technical difficulties of digital publishing in Arabic: ePub and OCR
PDF or Flash formats do not present any technical complications for local publishers. But Ramy Habeeb, the co-founder of Kotobarabia, explains that even when a text in Arabic has been carefully laid out using InDesign and other similar tools, converting it to ePub proves extremely troublesome, for various reasons: 1) The flow of text goes [...]
E-readers and tablets
Like in sub-Saharan Africa, in the Arab world possession of e-readers and tablets is limited to the wealthiest stratum of the social pyramid. The sales figures for the Kindle are not known, and devices like the iPad are considered luxury products. As Ramy Habeeb observes: We are not seeing the iPad phenomenon like we see [...]
Electronic payments: between the Web and mobile phones
Another characteristic that distances the Arab world from the countries of the North is the unwillingness of Internet users to make online purchases,[1] which perhaps explains why none of the virtual stores aimed at PC users from the internal market has been particularly successful. Ramy Habeeb comes straight to the point on this topic: Unfortunately [...]
Mobile phones as a publishing platform
Here too we can mention Kotobarabia, which in an attempt to diversify and supply the internal market, has put its efforts into distributing e-books via cell phone infrastructure.[1] In order to do this, in 2009, the portal teamed up with Sarmady, the digital branch of Vodafone in Egypt. Similarly, the Austrian company Blackbetty Mobilemedia, specializing [...]
The challenges of paper publishing: inefficient distribution and censorship
Now, while all these digital experiments are being carried out, what is going on in traditional publishing? The fact is that in the Arab world, the book sector has been facing enormous challenges for decades, with its main problem being the lack of a uniform distribution system. What is worse, there is no proper database [...]
Digital technology as an opportunity
As we suggested when analyzing the situation in sub-Saharan Africa, the fundamental challenges of publishing in the Arab world – in this case, inefficient analogue distribution and censorship – can be overcome or at least mitigated thanks to the incorporation of electronic technology. With regard to distribution problems, it is obvious that digital offers a potentially unlimited [...]
Possible trends
Currently, it is possible to identify various forces that are likely to have a considerable effect on future publishing in the Arab world: The recent political events that took place in Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, and other locations have already brought about modifications in the power structure of those countries, something that in turn [...]