Digital can democratise and empower Arab publishing across the entire MENA region in a way the print-focussed industry has proven year after year after year it cannot do.
MiddleEast24 carries an instructive review of the state of Arab publishing as we say goodbye to 2022. The English-language version is auto-translated and heavy going at times, but worth perusing at length.
The key points are that the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are seeing significant increases in reading – other Arab countries not so much. This ties closely with the level of government support the publishing industry receives, and perhaps most importantly that in many Arab countries there simply is no meaningful support, or even recognition, of the value of the publishing industry.
“Parallel publishing” – for which read piracy – is rampant in many countries, and the supply-chain crisis (and in particular the shortage and cost of paper) is having a serious impact.
The overview recognises the importance of digital in transforming the future of the region’s publishing industry, but rightly points out that most digital players are foreign, which is not itself the issue so much as many (not all) foreign players do not have the best interests of the region at heart.
Perhaps the most glaring omission in this report is the absence of any reference to outgoing IPA President Bodour Al Qasimi, who has in the past two years raised the international profile of Arab publishing multifold and championed digital embrace.
Bodour’s and the Sharjah Book Authority’s publishing crusade will go on, of course, but 2023 promises to be a year of even more challenges for Arab publishing as the economic and supply-chain realities (especially the paper shortage) hit home.
And as the global digital players tighten their belts so it will become increasing difficult for any real progress towards digitisation in the Arab publishing industry.
Difficult but not impossible. As with the Pandemic’s impact, the supply-chain crisis just might make the industry re-think its resistance to digital, and at least see digital as an invaluable safety net. But digital can be so much more.
It’s a telling point that in many western markets, and especially the US and UK, consumer interest in digital books is deliberately supressed (by print-comparable pricing and by holding back frontlist content) to protect the print status quo.
In the Arab markets there is no equivalent bricks-and-mortar print industry infrastructure to protect, and regionally it is the very nature of the bricks-and-mortar print industry infrastructure that prevents the development of regional Arab publishing (what chance a reader in Morocco or Palestine will ever get to read the top Arab titles published in the UAE, or Saudi Arabia?).
Digital can democratise and empower Arab publishing across the entire MENA region in a way the print-focussed industry has proven year after year after year it cannot do.
