Features

The Sharjah superstore

27.11.09 | Tom Tivnan

One of the most prominent features at the 28th Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF) is an item that you would be hard pressed to find at the London, Bologna or Frankfurt book fairs: shopping trolleys.

Over the 10 days of the fair—held this year from 11th to 21st November at Expo Centre Sharjah, and a stone's throw from its fellow United Arab Emirate capital Dubai—more than 450,000 members of the public piled in to buy books direct from pub­lishers, distributors and book­sellers from across the Arab region and beyond. The aisles were crammed with punters—think of a Tesco superstore in the run-up to Christmas, but instead of food, the carts are overloaded with books, with the shoppers in traditional Arab dress. Sales figures are not available for this year's fair, but at the 2008 SIBF, organisers say that more than $28m (£16.7m) worth of books were sold. With an average price of about $4, that equates to around 700,000 books shifted a day.

Sheikha Boudour Al Qasimi, daughter of Sharjah's ruler Dr Sultan bin Mohammed Al Qasimi, is the founder and c.e.o. of Arabic children's publisher Kalimat and chair of the one-year-old Emirates Publishing Association (EPA). A graduate of Columbia University's publishing programme, who has worked at Bloomsbury's London offices and is a veteran of LBF and Frankfurt, she appreciates how jarring a fair like SIBF can be to uninitiated Western publishers. She says: "If you first come to an Arab book fair, the thing you might think is that it is so ­chaotic, there is pushing and shoving and tons of schoolchildren. But looking at it another way, it is an opportunity for publishers to connect with their readers. And that is missing in the Western world, with publishers spending so much time and money on Facebook and Twitter trying to connect to their readers to see what they want to read. Whereas we see them right there on our stand."

Yet a reason why publishers connect with their customers throughout the Arab world by way of book fairs is because they have to. Book distribution is patchy at best in the region and the number of bookshops per capita is far below that of Western countries. The Arab book trade relies on fairs to get books to the public; there are major ones in all the UAE and Gulf capital cities, plus Cairo, Beirut and Casablanca, as well as a welter of minor fairs throughout the region. Haissam Fadel, sales manager of Casablanca-based publisher and distributor Arab Cultural Centre (which is Stephenie Meyer's Arabic-language publisher), says that "a good chunk" of his company's sales come from fairs. "It is our second year in Sharjah," he says, eyeing schoolchildren careening through his stand with more than a bit of ­wariness. "And it has started to pick up. But this is one of the smaller fairs for us."

Old school
This lack of distribution underscores the differences in publishing between the Arab world and the West. "It is something like the model that we had in Britain 150 to 200 years ago: the publisher is also the distributor and the bookseller," says Sheila Lambie, senior lecturer in publishing studies at Oxford Brookes University. "These companies tend to be family-owned business and most are keen to hold on to all the parts; the feeling is: 'Why should I let someone else make money on that part of my business?'"

Yet if most of the Arab book trade wants to hold on to this particular model, that should not be misconstrued as a reluctance to modernise or do business with the West. One focal point of the SIBF programme this year has been the pre-fair training seminars for Arab publishers on various issues such as selling and buying of rights and marketing, run by Lambie and her Oxford Brookes colleague Adrian Bullock under the auspices of the UK Publishers Association. Book trade-facing events over the course of SIBF 2009 included­ a seminar on copyright, again run in conjunction with the UK PA.

It is worth emphasising that the Arab trade is still a relatively nascent industry, with almost total government control of most publishing—particularly in the Gulf states—being the norm until just a couple of decades ago. The powerhouse countries in the region, Lebanon and Egypt, have grown because of a long standing tradition of book publishing, the advantage of Beirut and Cairo being major ports, a relative freedom from censorship and, in Egypt's case, being by far the most populous nation in the region. Yet even in both these countries, the most venerable publishing houses are rarely more than 60 years old.

Bachar Chebaro is secretary-general of the Arab Publishers Association (APA) and vice-president and partner of Beirut's Arab Scientific Publishers (ASP), one of the regions biggest publisher/distributor/bookshops. In addition to publishing education and trade titles (ASP has Arabic-language rights for authors including Dan Brown and Alexander McCall Smith), it owns the "Arabic Amazon", neelwafurat.com. Chebaro points out that the Western concept of copyright is relatively new: "Up until 10, maybe 15 years ago, many publishers thought that to translate a book into Arabic, you didn't have to pay for rights. And it was not just small publishers that were doing this, but some very big ones. Piracy­ meant taking a book from another Arabic publisher, not the actual rights-holder. Now that has changed."

Though perceptions have changed, Chebaro does acknowledge that piracy­ is still a problem and says one of the main tasks of the APA is to convince fellow Arab publishers of the sanctity of copyright. There is some lobbying of governments to do, as well. By Egyptian law, a publisher in that country is able to bring out an Arabic version of a book, if no one has snapped up the rights within three years of it being published in its original language.

Show me the money
The shift in attitude on copyright has come for a number of reasons, with a major impetus coming from large government-sponsored Arabic translation projects that have been launched in recent years—such as the Abu Dhabi-backed Kalima, and the ruler of Dubai Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum's $10bn initiative—that require scrupulous proof of territorial rights for the publishers involved in the scheme.

That Arabic publishers are keen to sell rights abroad helps as well. Chebaro's ASP is in advanced talks with a major London literary agency to acquire English-language titles for the Arabic market, and sell into Britain. Sheikha Boudour says that part of the reason for forming the EPA earlier this year was to ramp up UAE publishers' rights sales. "We needed a voice for the independent publishers to go out to Frankfurt, BEA or LBF," she says. "It is about matchmaking, setting up the right UAE publisher with the right foreign publisher."

It should not go unnoticed that there are a welter of book-related initiatives, particularly in the UAE, that are backed by the government. This may not necessarily be down to a dewy-eyed interest in culture; the oil and gas resources may be depleted for the UAE as a whole in less than a century, while Sharjah itself has no oil reserves. Having an educated professional class to drive the country forward in an oil-less future is perhaps more a clear-headed business decision. Whatever the motive, the UAE is keen to raise literacy rates (which hover around 75% to 80% through the region), and books are becoming more prominent than ever before. An example is a centre­piece of the Sheikh Al Qasimi's cultural policies, the Sharjah-wide Knowledge Without Borders campaign. The AED 150m (£24.3m) scheme will give 42,000 families throughout the emirate a personalised library of 50 books by 2012.

Whether region-wide governmental investment into education and literacy programmes has, or will, boost the book trade may be difficult to assess. "To be honest, we are not so good with numbers," says Chebaro. He goes on to explain that some publishers still do not use ISBNs and there is not a central database like Nielsen BookScan, so overall market figures are difficult to come by. Unesco figures put the Arab states' publishing output—a region of some 340 million people—at less than Greece's, a nation of 11 million. Yet given the unaccounted nature of the Arab trade, Unesco's numbers seem dubious to say the least.

Not just religion
Back at the stalls of SIBF, at least, things are buzzing. The received wisdom that the Arab market is only about religious books and English-language academic titles seems outmoded and just plain wrong. Those types of books are certainly there, but children's seems to be the biggest category, and there are noticeable number of graphic novels, Western cookery books (Nigella and Gordon in particular), and yes, even the Twilight series. It would be unwise to overstate the popularity of Western titles, but there does seem to be opportunity.

Michelle Alwan, Scholastic's ­Middle East and North Africa sales manager, is doing a roaring trade at her stand. Scholastic has been coming to SIBF for the past two years, previously its titles were sold through a distributor's stall. There are, of course, some censorship issues—any YA title with a hint of sex is forbidden, though interesting that Twilight gets a pass—but picture books are a growth category. She says: "The population is growing, the schools are increasingly focused on English language. I've been working in the region for more than 10 years, and there has never been so much going on."

Sheikha Boudour is similarly bullish: "I was in the US during the summer and the mood was gloomy; the whole time everyone was saying: 'The publishing industry is dying.' But I kept thinking, that it is not that way in our part of the world, it is booming."

Trackback URL for this post:

http://www.thebookseller.com/trackback/13588

Latest Jobs

Project Editor
We have an excellent new role with a...
Available on request
Executive Editor - Children's Books
Do you know what makes a great...
Competitive
Managing Editor
The Pharmaceutical Press are looking...
£35,000 - £40,000 plus benefits
 

TheBookseller