A publishing network being assembled through bilateral relationships and patient institutional work, running through Kuala Lumpur rather than London, New York or Frankfurt.

Back in May, when the Sharjah Book Authority sent a delegation to Kuala Lumpur two weeks ahead of the city’s book fair, TNPS wrote that the IPA World Congress in July would be “the next moment of visibility” for a publishing corridor Sharjah has been building, quietly, since 2017.

That prediction has now been overtaken by events (plural). And the most substantial of them arrived with almost no fanfare at all.

What July Actually Delivered

Between 5 and 13 July, in and around the 35th IPA World Congress in Kuala Lumpur, the Sharjah Book Authority put its name to four separate pieces of news:

● 5–9 July – Malaysia hosted the IPA Congress for the first time in the event’s 130-year history, with Sharjah among its sponsors.

● 8 July – Kota Buku and the UAE’s Kalimat Foundation announced a “Pledge a Library” handover to five Kuala Lumpur schools, with Bodour Al Qasimi presiding.

● 10 July – At the Congress’s closing Gala Dinner, Sharjah was formally announced as host of the 36th International Publishers Congress in 2028.

● 13 July – Big Bad Wolf Sharjah, a Sharjah Book Authority subsidiary, signed an MoU with BookXcess Malaysia giving it exclusive rights to develop and operate the BookXcess bookstore brand across the Middle East and Africa.

Four announcements, ten days, one delegation, one recurring cast – Bodour Al Qasimi, SBA CEO Ahmed bin Rakkad Al Ameri, Big Bad Wolf co-founder Andrew Yap.

Read individually, these press releases look like a fair’s worth of routine goodwill diplomacy.

Read together, they are the visible surface of exactly the pattern TNPS flagged in May: a publishing network being assembled through bilateral relationships and patient institutional work, running through Kuala Lumpur rather than London, New York or Frankfurt.

The BookXcess story, the most commercially and strategically significant of the four, went largely unremarked in the world’s trade press. What coverage exists comes from the WAM wire and its syndication chain, plus one more independently framed piece from Arabian Post. Nobody seems to have noticed that Sharjah now controls the operating rights to a bookstore brand across two continents.

This Started in 2019, Not July 2026

Here is the part that most changes how this story unfolds. The instinct, reading the July press release cold, is to treat the BookXcess deal as a new idea – Sharjah spotting an opportunity at a book fair and moving quickly to claim it. TNPS’s own archive says otherwise.

In November 2019, at the tail end of what was then Big Bad Wolf’s tenth anniversary year, Big Bad Wolf and the Sharjah Book Authority announced a joint venture – Big Bad Wolf Sharjah – with a five-year target to ship one billion books into the Middle East and Africa, coordinated through a newly opened Big Bad Wolf office in Sharjah Publishing City.

Ahmed Bin Rakkad Al Ameri described it then in almost identical language to the language he used this July: making good books more accessible, boosting circulation of Arab and African publishers’ output, promoting cultural exchange across the region.

Big Bad Wolf brought in DHL Global Forwarding as its logistics partner, citing the customs complexity of shipping millions of physical books – a major event could require up to 70 shipping containers – into markets with wildly differing import regulations.

That five-year window ran 2019 to 2024. It overlapped almost exactly with a global pandemic that shut down physical retail, events, and cross-border logistics for the better part of two of those five years.

The one-billion-book target was understandably quietly set aside, but this year the broad project resurfaced, albeit with no specific figure. One billion books did not get mentioned, but we do know Big Bad Wolf has sold over 50 million books since 2009.

The Sharjah warehouse hub that grew out of that 2019 venture is now serving book sale logistics across Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kenya and Tanzania, alongside the original Southeast Asian markets – the same footprint TNPS described in May, arrived at the hard way, through a pandemic, rather than announced and left to gather dust.

Seen against that backdrop, the BookXcess deal isn’t Sharjah discovering a Malaysian retail brand in July 2026. It’s the same joint venture, seven years old, converting a logistics-and-events relationship into permanent bricks-and-mortar retail – the next stage of an ambition that was always there, delayed rather than abandoned.

The View From The Beach

None of which is a reason to take the July announcement entirely at face value. The Arabian Post’s coverage – the most useful of the syndicated batch – noted plainly that no timetable, investment figure, or list of initial store locations was disclosed, but early days. MoUs of this kind routinely precede the operational detail by months; Sharjah’s own publishing initiatives have a track record of both delivering (the warehouse network, the Publishing City free zone, the library programmes) and occasionally overpromising against timelines that outside events then overtake. Th Pandemic hit the whole world.

So the TNPS take for now is that Sharjah has done this before, under this same partner, and the underlying relationship has a longer track record than the news reportage suggested. That’s a reason for interested readers – and for BookXcess’s future retail partners across Africa and the Gulf and beyond – to watch for the operational detail as it emerges, not a reason to assume it won’t.

Sharjah’s south-south publishing corridor is no longer a thesis. It has a paper trail now running back to 2019, and forward to at least 2028.

But if this is to be considered the story behind the story, an even bigger Big Bad Wolf story still waits exploration. Stay tuned for that one soon!

This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn Analysis Newsletter.