Last year the UAE’s Sharjah International Book Fair saw well over 2 million visitors while Cairo was still reeling from Covid-19 restrictions.
“Arabs only read for a few minutes a year”? This apparently from the “Arab Thought Foundation”, which clearly doesn’t understand the “thought” part of its name.
As reported by Al Ahram Daily via MiddleEast24,
The book industry statistics in the Arab world show that what is produced by all the Arab countries combined is less than what is produced by a single European country such as Spain. The report issued by the Arab Thought Foundation confirmed that the comparison between the level of reading in Arab and Western countries is in the interest of the Western reader, as he devotes 200 hours of his time each year to reading, while the Arab reader does not exceed a few minutes annually.
Do be serious. Sure there are very real challenges to book distribution in many parts of the Arab world, due to geography and logistics (and in the case of Palestine, politics) but it is complete and utter nonsense to suggest Arabs are somehow immune to the allure of reading.
We’re a week or two away from Egypt’s Cairo International Book Fair, in most years the largest book fair in the world by footfall. Any visitor count fewer than two million would be a national embarrassment.
Last year the UAE’s Sharjah International Book Fair saw well over 2 million visitors while Cairo was still reeling from Covid-19 restrictions.
Pre-pandemic, the Algiers International Book Fair regularly pulled in 2 million visitors.
In 2019 Sharjah peaked at 2.5 million visitors and Algiers was left wondering what went wrong when it only attracted 1.1 million to its big event.
Apart from Madrid, how many North American or European book fairs do you know that have ever attracted one million visitors?
Yet the international book fairs of Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), Baghdad (Iraq) and Muscat (Oman) regularly pull in one million visitors.
Pre-pandemic, Big Bad Wolf was regularly taking 3 million books to its eleven day Dubai book sale.
Multi-hundred thousand visitor book fairs are not at all unusual in the region.
The notion that Arabs don’t read is just plain stupid.
