{"id":269596,"date":"2009-03-24T14:16:26","date_gmt":"2009-03-24T14:16:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2009\/03\/24\/e-everything\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:24:13","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:24:13","slug":"e-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2009\/03\/24\/e-everything\/","title":{"rendered":"E-Everything"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post originally appeared at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair<\/a> blog.<\/em><\/p>\n

One of the most interesting panels I\u2019ve attended here at the book fair was the \u201cBusiness Potentials of Digital Publishing\u201d seminar that took place this afternoon. This is a topic that I\u2019m personally really interested in, and following a few disparaging comments about e-books in the Arab Market Overview session, I couldn\u2019t wait to hear about what kind of digital projects are going on in this region, and what Arab publishers thought of the brave new e-world. <\/p>\n

Dalia M. Ibrahim of Nahdet Misr Publishing & Printing in Egypt\u2013which happens to be the Arabic publishers of the Harry Potter books\u2013put forth a strong presentation about the need for e-content, and more importantly, the need to create and distribute this content in a smart fashion. It\u2019s easy to recognize the potential of e-books and other forms of online content, but as Dalia has experienced at Nahdet Misr, where over they past six years they\u2019ve spent a lot on e-projects without receiving a return on investment, there are a lot of obstacles that have to be overcome to make this a viable model.<\/p>\n

The way that Dalia and Ramy presented internet use in the Arab world was pretty interesting. According to both of them, although internet use increased by 1000% between 2000 and 2007, only 10% of the searches by Arab users were for \u201cmeaningful\u201d information. (Obviously this is a bit of a value judgement, but they compared searching for information about a potential health problem as meaningful versus chatting and IMing as meaningless.) A corollary to this situation is that there is a lack of worthwhile content available online in Arabic. According to Ramy, \u201cunlike the west, there aren\u2019t even very many personal webpages.\u201d<\/p>\n

This situation can be seen as a great opportunity, and Dalia called on Arab publishers to invest in the future and start creating e-content so that their future market share will be that much greater. With a lack of immediate economical incentives, she also called for governments and NGOs to supply funding to publishers to allow for the creation of culturally valuable e-content.<\/p>\n

Ronald Schild\u2013who works with Libreka! (exclamation point theirs)\u2013provided a slick, well-organized, effective overview of the potentials of the e-book market, providing a case against allowing Amazon and Google to dominate the marketplace, and instead arguing for a more open market with several modes of distribution. He also offered some \u201cbest practices\u201d to publishers entering the e-world, including the need to stop piracy, the need to offer your whole catalog as e-books instead of just the best-sellers, the need to leave behind the insanities of DRM<\/span>, and the need for publishers to \u201cbe fast.\u201d<\/p>\n

All of this is very interesting, and actually offers one potential solution to the distibution difficulties existing in the Arab world: Instead of trying to figure out how to deliver books from one country to another continent and sell them at a reasonable price, why not just work towards developing e-books, which can be downloaded from anywhere at a (potentially) cheaper price?<\/p>\n

Another technology-related solution that\u2019s come up a few times is the idea of decentralized short run printing. Basically, the idea is that there could be \u201dbook centers\u201d in every Arab country equipped with similar short run digital printing equipment. So to avoid shipping costs under this model, a book published by an Egyptian publisher, let\u2019s say, would be digitally sent to the book centers where there is a market for the book (different countries have different censorship standards) and then printed in quanties of 50, or 300, or whatever is needed. (The number that keeps getting bandied about is that the average book sells around 1,500 copies throughout the Arab world.)<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, there were only a few Arabic publishers who attended this whole session, but everyone who did was very engaged and excited to talk about all the opportunities that e-publishing presents. And according to Ramy, this is another market that foreign publishers could participate in, and which could serve a way to increase the interactions between Arabic publishers and the rest of the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post originally appeared at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair blog. One of the most interesting panels I\u2019ve attended here at the book fair was the \u201cBusiness Potentials of Digital Publishing\u201d seminar that took place this afternoon. This is a topic that I\u2019m personally really interested in, and following a few disparaging comments about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[19766,1836],"class_list":["post-269596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-abu-dhabi-book-fair","tag-cwp"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269596"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":353726,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269596\/revisions\/353726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}