Doha: A study revealed that the Arab publishing industry faces major challenges including counterfeiting and piracy.
The study was issued by the Arab Publishers’ Association (APA) in the middle of 2021, on the state of publishing in the Arab region from 2015 to 2019.
It showed the industry suffered from counterfeiting, piracy, and declining sales, which threatened the said industry until many publishers had to either reduce the number of annual publications and the number of workers in publishing houses or stop temporarily. Also, many Arab book fairs were cancelled or postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which was an important outlet for book distribution that the publishers lost. Another APA study revealed that book fairs represent 53 percent of book sales annually.
In a statement to Qatar News Agency, APA Secretary-General and Hamad Bin Khalifa University Press Executive Director, Bachar Chebaro affirmed that great challenges are facing the publishing industry in the Arab world that require urgent action to preserve the rights of authors and publishers and increase book sales, which are currently experiencing a sharp decline.
Chebaro stated that the challenges facing the publishing industry in the Arab world and the whole world are great and perhaps the most important challenge in the Arab world is that the publishing industry lacks two basic lines from the beginning of the profession to its end.
He explained that the Arab society lacks a literary rights agent, who is like a corporate lawyer, and he is the one who transmits the book, with his relations, from one language to another, as well as from one country to another, also, it lacks a distribution company. He pointed out that there is no book distribution company at the level of the Arab world, and that there is currently distribution within countries and is linked to newspapers.
Chebaro also added that book fairs play a role in strengthening relations between publishers, authors, and researchers, and not just selling books individually to the readers because this is the function of the library. He said that the publisher harms the library, because two months before the book fair purchase stops, and also two months after it because people are saturated during the exhibition.
To meet these challenges, the APA Secretary-General demanded establishing a website in cooperation between the APA and Arab governmental cultural institutions, and in each country, there would be an office and a modern printing machine. The reader enters the site and chooses his desired book and prints in his country, thus reducing the burden of storage on publishers and delivery is via semi-instant mail.
On the possibility of APA taking over this proposal, Chebaro said that the Association can indeed but it needs support from governments because it needs an accurate and practical programme, places to place printing and execution devices, and a group of employees to perform the tasks, and with time, publishing will be strengthened in this way.
Chebaro moreover said that APA brings together national federations and it is the mother of the trade union movement, and it had a role in Arab fairs, especially in the Gulf, such as exempting Arab publishing houses from fees or reducing them, as happened in Doha, Sharjah, Riyadh, among other fairs.
