Official poster for the 2013 Cairo International Book Fair.
The 44th Cairo International Book Fair (CIBF), scheduled to run January 23-February 5, 2013, is the second held since the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, but the first since the election of President Mohamed Morsi and his cabinet. More specifically, the Fair’s coincidence with the January 25th anniversary of the Revolution inevitably ties it to questions about post-revolutionary Egypt. “Irrespective of how many times you might have been to the CIBF, the situation in Egypt is evolving at such a rate that the Fair of three years ago would be very different from the Fair of today,” said Dr. Nigel Fletcher-Jones, Director of the American University in Cairo Press. “What the spirit of this year’s CIBF will be is anyone’s guess.”
The “spirit” of the Fair has had its ups and downs in the past 40+ years. The first CIBF hosted 8 countries, with 262 publishers in 1969, reports Samir Saad Khalil, a Cairo-based publishing consultant and the Fair’s Director from its launch in 1969 until 2002. By 1991, the CIBF had grown to host publishers from 92 countries, an international scope nearing that of Frankfurt at the time. During the deteriorating Egyptian political situation of the mid-90’s the Cairo Book Fair began to fall from prominence. The Cairo Fairgrounds which had long hosted the Fair fell into such disrepair that all Halls and outbuildings were dismantled. Though there had been plans to rebuild, “the budget for reconstruction disappeared in governmental upheaval during the 2011 revolution,” said Khalil, “leaving the grounds empty of any buildings.” Tents were nevertheless erected last year and again this year, and will function in place of the missing halls.
The book industry in which the CIBF boomed and faded–and the one to which it is attempting to return–is one in which fairs play a pivotal role. “There is still no book distribution system in the Arab world,” says Cornelia Helle, Frankfurt Book Fair Sales Manager for the Middle East and Iran. “The publishers absolutely depend on…the many book fairs for the purpose of buying and selling. They have to go there if they wish to survive.” Samir Khalil points out that most countries in the region have two fairs per year (the second Egyptian fair is held in Alexandria): “I know a lot of Arab publishers who move directly from one book fair to another for seven to eight months out of the year” in order to adequately distribute their books.
Recent efforts to transform the region’s Book Fairs are most visible in the United Arab Emirates, at Fairs in the cities of Sharjah and Abu Dhabi, with significant involvement from the Frankfurt Book Fair at Abu Dhabi. Professional development programs and forums for Rights sales have been added, but “even at Sharjah and Abu Dhabi, Arab publishers mainly come to sell their books,” says Helle. As for CIBF, Nigel Fletcher-Jones estimates the percentage of non-Arabic publishers at the CIBF is still under 5%, saying that, because of the Fair’s role as primary distribution system, “it’s very much a home territory exhibition.” Translator and Arabic Literature (in English) blogger M. Lynx Qualey noted an increase in translators and international editors in 2012, but suspects this was more curiosity about the first post-revolutionary CIBF than any sustainable change to the overall culture of the Fair.
Nevertheless, there are several significant additions to the 2012 CIBF programing that indicate the commitment of the General Egyptian Book Organization (GEBO), the Egyptian Publishers Association (EPA), and other industry groups to transforming the profile of the Fair and the Egyptian book industry as a whole. 2013 will be the first Cairo Book Fair to host a two-day professional development program for publishers, and the first year that the GEBO will give an award for excellence in Egyptian publishing, while continuing the awards for individual titles begun in 2012. Khalil also reports that the GEBO is organizing several initiatives at this year’s CIBF to foster more foreign rights deals.
No matter how many countries exist in the region and how many attend a given book fair, it’s crucial to understand that “we have one common market …affected not only by the current situation in Egypt but also by the situation…of the surrounding region,” says Balsam Saad, Managing Director of Al-Balsam Publishing House and Bookstore in Cairo. This makes it all the easier to understand Nigel Fletcher-Jones’ argument that for most book publishers, the great challenge isn’t censorship within Egypt (although it does exist). Rather, it is international distribution, the same challenge that eats up bandwidth at regional book fairs, and sends publishers shuttling from one fair to the next for more than half the year. “The importation of books into Egypt and the exporting of books from Egypt to other parts of the Middle East continues to be problematic,” says Fletcher-Jones. “Books have to be inspected, to the extent that, if [the authorities] disagree with the representation of the border between Egypt and Sudan in a tourist guide, we’ll have to put little stickers over that part of the map, just so we can get the book in to the country.” He adds “That’s a major incentive to go digital, of course; once the traffic isn’t physical anymore, things get a bit easier.” While digital publishing (very nascent in the Arab world) may help solve some problems, international Arabic distribution and its politics will need to be largely reinvented before the Cairo International Book Fair or any other book fair in the region can transform in turn.
