This is not the model western publishing imagined when it thought about emerging markets.

The Kuala Lumpur International Book Fair is underway. 1,210 booths, 1.9 million expected visitors, Saudi Arabia as Focus Country. It is among the largest book fairs in Southeast Asia and one of the most significant on the annual calendar. So no surprise that the UAE’ Sharjah is also present.

But what may come as a surprise is that Sharjah was already in Kuala Lumpur two weeks prior. The Sharjah Book Authority sent a senior delegation on May 15th, well ahead of the fair, for a series of meetings that tell a more interesting story than anything likely to emerge from the KLIBF floor. A window into a publishing axis that has been assembling itself, with increasing deliberateness, largely out of sight of London, New York and Frankfurt.

The Timing Is Not Coincidental

The IPA World Congress convenes in Kuala Lumpur in July. Sharjah being Sharjah, it did not wait for that event and conduct bilateral meetings on the margins. They sent a delegation in May – two months ahead – to walk the floor with Big Bad Wolf and BookXcess, to study Malaysian library infrastructure in depth, and to hold substantive discussions with Adibah Omar, CEO of Kota Buku, who had previously participated in SBA programmes and recently took third place at the PublisHer Excellence Awards.

That sequencing matters. When the IPA Congress opens in July, the SBA delegation will arrive as arguably the best-briefed non-Malaysian party in the room on Malaysian publishing infrastructure. That is not accidental diplomacy. It’s preparation.

And then there is KLIBF. Saudi Arabia’s selection as Focus Country is not incidental context for this story – it is the competitive backdrop.

Saudi Arabia has been prosecuting an increasingly assertive cultural diplomacy across the Islamic world and beyond. Its presence in Morocco during the Rabat World Book Capital celebrations earlier this year was significant.

Riyadh has been systematically investing in publishing and literary infrastructure under Vision 2030, deploying newer and larger money into a space that Sharjah has cultivated with longer patience and deeper institutional roots.

In the Gulf, Saudi Arabia and the UAE operate as friendly rivals in the projection of Arab cultural influence. Sharjah has built its publishing identity over decades – the World Book Capital designation in 2019, books woven into the emirate’s civic DNA, and the SBA’s expanding international investment portfolio.

But as KLIBF opens with Saudi Arabia in the spotlight, Sharjah will already have had the quieter, more substantive conversations. That is a meaningful soft-power position, and it did not happen by accident.

What the Delegation Was Actually Studying

The Sharjah Book Authority | هيئة الشارقة للكتاب delegation – led by Majid Al Nuaimi, Director of Partnerships and Investment, and Iman Ben Chaibah, Director of Strategic Initiatives and Global Markets – examined supply chains, procurement models, and pricing structures. They reviewed how Malaysia has positioned libraries as cultural and tourism destinations. They looked closely at RexKL, a former cinema repurposed as a library and community space, and My Town within the BookXcess network.

This is not a study tour. This is due diligence. Sharjah is examining replicable models for transforming libraries from passive repositories into active community destinations, alongside the logistics and economics of large-scale discounted book retail. Both threads are directly applicable to Sharjah’s own expanding ambitions.

The discussions with Kota Buku covered cross-market cultural initiatives, professional development in publishing, knowledge exchange programmes, and – significantly – the expansion of Arabic content into Asian markets.

That last element signals something beyond bilateral admiration. It suggests a content flow ambition: Arabic publishing finding readers in Southeast Asia through the infrastructure that Malaysian bookselling has built.

The SBA-BBW Relationship in Context

The Sharjah Book Authority’s investment in Big Bad Wolf dates to 2019, when SBA took a stake that helped extend BBW’s reach into the Middle East and Africa.

Since then BBW has established a second warehouse hub in Sharjah alongside its primary operations in Shah Alam, Malaysia, serving as the logistics base for events across the Middle East and the African continent – a footprint that now includes Tanzania, Kenya, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia alongside the original Southeast Asian markets.

What began as an investment has matured into an operational partnership with serious geographic reach. The May Kuala Lumpur visit looks less like an investor checking in and more like a strategic principal returning to the source to study the model that will underpin the next phase of expansion.

BBW’s own website currently lists 49 cities across what it describes as 17 countries – a figure that, counted against the named markets (15), suggests two further launches are imminent. The events calendar and the SBA announcements are worth watching in parallel.

A South-South Corridor, Quietly Under Construction

TNPS has been tracking Sharjah’s international publishing moves since 2017, and a pattern has become increasingly legible. In parallel with this Kuala Lumpur visit, SBA has been deepening ties with Morocco – unsurprising given Rabat’s World Book Capital status for 2026.

But here’s the thing: The direction of travel is consistent: Sharjah is constructing a publishing network that connects the Gulf, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Africa, with knowledge exchange, content flows, and logistics infrastructure as the building blocks.

This is not the model western publishing imagined when it thought about emerging markets. It does not run through London or New York. It does not depend on Frankfurt for its legitimacy. It is being assembled through bilateral relationships, strategic investment, and patient institutional work. And it’s steeping into a vacuum of disinteret among western publishing.

The IPA Congress in July will be the next moment of visibility as the Kula Lumpur International Book Fair winds down for another year.

Further reading on Malaysia’s publishing renaissance:

This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn Analysis newsletter.