The partnership creates “a pairing uniquely positioned to deliver the optimum experience for 400m+ Arabic speakers globally.”

“Arabookverse specializes in distributing Arabic digital content globally.”

With that single sentence from the press release this week, the game-changing nature of the Arabookverse-Beat Technology team-up is clear.

Arabic-language audiobook platforms have been around a long while now, in digital audiobook terms, as TNPS regulars will know.

Back in 2017, one of the earliest TNPS posts on the then mostly-ignored Arab book markets covered Dhad, the Saudi-based audiobook start-up that launched the same year.

But even then, long before Storytel came to the region, there was already a region-wide operation in the form of Kitab Sawti, then the largest Arabic audiobook publishers in the world, and which itself would in time be acquired by then then expanding Storytel.

That was two years after Storytel launched it Middle East operation.

Country or region-based MENA audiobook startups continue to proliferate, with Feriel Benslim‘s Nbookini نبوكيني among the most recent, while Paris-based YouScribe has been expanding its ebook/audiobook subscription service across the far west of MENA

So what makes Egypt/UK-based Arabookverse different is its targetted wide reach not just across the whole MENA, but being accessible globally for the myriad Arabic-speaking diaspora. Per the press release, the partnership creates “a pairing uniquely positioned to deliver the optimum experience for 400m+ Arabic speakers globally.”

For those who buy into racial stereotypes and the “Arabs don’t read” mentality, audiobooks are the logical solution to bring literature to the wretched masses who would never be seen dead with a book in their hands.

But of course such faux narratives are the stuff of publishing legend that have little place in reality, as TNPS has long been asserting.

This was TNPS back in 2017, in our third week of operation.

Or more recently:

Later this month is the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, where audiobooks will compete with AI as flavour of the day.

Beat Technology’s Nathan Hull will be there alongside Ali Abdel-moneim and Ahmed Rewihel, familiar with TNPS readers from their past existences at Storytel and Kitab Sawti. Hull, of course, is the ubiquitous driving force behind the Norway-based start-up that powers audiobook and ebook services in countries as diverse as Norway (Fabel), Germany (Skoobe), Netherlands (Fluister), Adlibris (Sweden/Finland), Romania (Audiotribe), Poland (Volume), Greece (Jukebooks), Legible (Canada) and Gardners (UK).

This post marks along-overdue return to “normality” for TNPS, after unprecedented downtime this past month or so due to connectivity issues (being able to write this short post at one sitting without a connection failure or an electricity blackout is quite an achievement here), but there’s much more to catch up on in the MENA and wider global publishing markets.

Stay tuned.