RAMY HABEEB HAS a lot on his plate. The 29-year-old co-founder and director of Kotobarabia has to market nearly 4,000 works of 1,100 authors to consumers who — if they read at all — are generally jaded with the fare they’ve come to expect from the region’s decrepit publishing industry. Habeeb’s strategy for overcoming the problems of terrible distribution networks is novel (for the region, at least): Egypt-based Kotobarabia distributes its entire Arabic-only catalogue digitally, through its website — the first Middle Eastern publisher to do so. Customers purchase books by credit card online or (for Egyptian customers without credit cards) pre-paid cards delivered to their homes, then download them in .pdf format to read on their own computers.

Habeeb explains that he did a survey and discovered that most books in Egypt are “limited in distribution to how far the publishing house can physically carry the books. That means the majority of books published here in Egypt only have a three to five kilometer radius. That basically means your book is not available in Alexandria, it’s only available in Downtown Cairo. Forget Sudan, forget Syria and the Levant and the [Gulf countries].”

Habeeb hopes to appeal to readers who have resigned themselves to never finding the books they want and not being able to afford them even if they can find them. The problem, he says, lays squarely at the feet of the publishers: “The supply side of the publishing industry is quite weak. With a market of 75 million people [in Egypt], 60% of whom are literate, you’re talking about a huge market.”

By offering a wide variety of titles — from religious texts to “hot topics” (wink, wink) and, yes, books banned by Arab governments — Habeeb hopes to finally present Egyptian and Arab readers with the choices they’ve been denied by the print industry. But his potential market is not limited to Egypt or even the greater Arab world. “[The goal] is to continue to promote Arabic literature — in Arabic — throughout the world. There are over 20 million Arabs living outside of the Arab world with no access to literature in their mother tongue.

“People are unaware that you can get an entire book downloaded to your computer,” Habeeb says, but the difficulties he faces are greater than simply educating readers about the availability of the service.

“Censorship is a way of life here,” he says simply. While Kotobarabia has yet to come under fire for any of the titles in its catalogue, Habeeb takes no chances. The company’s servers are all kept offshore to protect them both physically and legally from seizure. He is confident that local governments have no reason to be threatened by any of Kotobarabia’s titles, including the bestselling banned books. “I would be surprised if something happened,” he says, “but I accept it as a possibility.”

In addition to the website’s catalogue, Kotobarabia hopes to organize online nadwas (cultural seminars) for its authors. “Why not have it so an author can talk about his book in Egypt, and someone in the US can real-time watch his presentation and send him questions through instant messenger?”

It’s not just the customers who have been disappointed by the failures of the traditional print industry. “One of our authors sold two books on our site, one in Egypt and one in New Zealand,” Habeeb recalls. “He earned 60 US cents off of that sale, and he came to our office with over LE 100 worth of cakes and treats and stuff like that. We asked him ‘What were you doing?’ and he said, ‘I just couldn’t believe that someone in New Zealand would read my book. Thank you so much.’”

Habeeb and Kotobarabia won the 2007 Egyptian Young Publisher of the Year award, a yearly honor given by the British Council to entrepreneurial young publishers. He was flown to the United Kingdom to meet with members of the publishing industry before and during the annual London Book Fair and to compete for the title of International Young Publisher of the Year (IYPY). Habeeb was the first e-publisher of any nationality to be nominated in the four-year history of the IYPY award.

“I don’t think I worked harder in my life than in the last ten days,” says an exhausted Habeeb, referring to his frantic tours of the publishing and distribution houses of Essex, London and Scotland. He met with officials from the smallest publishing outfits up through the giants of the industry, including Penguin and Random House.

Afterwards Habeeb found himself at the London Book Fair. The London fair is significantly smaller than its Cairo counterpart, and Habeeb notes the purpose of the fair itself is different. All the activity was oriented around selling manuscripts and foreign publishing rights. According to Habeeb, “Hundreds upon hundreds of people [were] running around doing business. The Cairo Book Fair tends to focus on selling from the publishing house to the consumer, whereas the London Book Fair was closed to the public — it was only open for those who were publishers [or] somehow related to the publishing field.”

His time at the fair seems to have been productive. Although he is firm that the plan is still in the early stages of negotiation, Habeeb is very optimistic about a discussion he had with Google, whose online book service allows full search of the text of books in dozens of languages — but not Arabic. “Should things go well, we’ll be able to start including the Arabic publishing industry in the Google book service. This is the goal.”

Habeeb was also excited about a discussion he had with Next Page, a Bulgarian foundation devoted to developing the publishing industries in Eastern Europe and the developing world. Next Page, which published a study on the reading habits of Arabs (see “What do Egyptians Read?” by Staff Writer Yasmeen El Mallah, in the March 2007 issue of Business Today Egypt, page 72), spoke with Habeeb about organizing an August symposium on the digitization of Arabic content and methods of marketing foreign books in the Arab world.

All his work is paying off. Habeeb was one of nine candidates nominated for the 2007 IYPY award. With contestants from throughout Eastern Europe, Malta, Argentina, India and Syria, the competition was quite tough.

Although the judges praised Habeeb for his “clear vision and mission” and pioneering work, the IYPY award eventually went to S. Anand of India’s Navayana Publishing. Anand has devoted his labors to fighting the deep-rooted caste system in India by publishing scholarly and literary work to dissolve widespread class prejudice.

Home from his hectic British tour, Habeeb is back to work, struggling to develop a nigh-nonexistent market in the peculiar market environment of Egypt and the Arab world. He plans to continue pushing the site through online portals such as MSN Arabia, Masrawy and Filbalad.

In the next six months to a year, Habeeb also hopes to establish a fee-based payment system to allow members to gain full access to the website’s catalogue. This scheme, which Habeeb likens to a library, would allow customers to browse at their leisure for a flat fee, the proceeds of which would be divided among the authors. Habeeb sees the membership system as something that would appeal to universities and libraries looking to increase their Arabic content.

“If you walk into any university in the world, [] you’ll find computers with thousands of journals and books in electronic format [], but you won’t find any Arabic content, or you’ll find limited Arabic content that is primarily [in] academic journal [form],” he says.  et