The four books I bought from the Amman Book Fair
Today, Saturday, is the last day of the Amman book fair. It opens till 10 or 11 pm. So today is your last chance to visit.

The Amman ‘International’ book fair, which is being held in the Abdali Development Project zone (in the makeshift hangers which were set up for one of those Iraq rebuilding expos) is a huge demonstration about all what’s wrong with the Arab book industry, and, by extension, Arab culture.

First of all, the fair is not ‘international’. At best, it can be characterized as ‘Arab’. That’s OK, just don’t call it international if it’s not.

Book fairs are supposed to be celebrations of books, culture and the arts. Usually, such fairs are promoted with interesting posters. You’d expect the publishers to design their booths in an attractive fashion, or promote their latest books in an engaging manner. Not in Amman.

There is 0% effort at branding the Fair by the organizers and also 0% at design and presentation by the exhibitors. The way they treat their wares (ie the books) is just to stack/throw them on endless rows of table. The epitome of ‘creativity’ shown by publishers would be the stacking of books in a spiral tower! I swear the local vegetable souk is a million times more interesting to look at.

At the entrance, no one give you a map of the fair or an exhibitor list. No one even tries to promote anything to you. Why publishers haven’t yet learned from, say, computer fairs, is beyond me.

I can already see some of you shifting in their seat while reading this. “It’s about the content, not the presentation, Ahmad. Don’t be such an elitist design fanatic, Ahmad”. No. IT IS about content AND presentation. Anyone who ignores that has no idea about the art of human communication, or, for that matter, today’s market realities.

So let’s talk about the content. You’ll find booth after booth after booth of the usual reprints of ‘turath’ (heritage) books. Tons and tons of conspiracy theory books. Stacks and stacks of neo-islamic books with scary/weird covers.

Then there are cookbooks, which apparently where all the rage this year. I read in Al Ghad that there was an “onslaught of demand” for cookbooks by visitors.

Talking about cookbooks, there always has to the customary comment by a ‘leftist’ or ‘nationalist’ ‘intellectual’ condemning the cookbook phenomena through ‘cultural’ analysis, by which buying cookbooks is just another sign that we are ‘imitating the (consumerist/capitalist/entertainment oriented culture of the dominant West blah blah blah’.

If those intellectuals had their way, we’d only have booth after booth of Karl Marx, Che Guevara, Ghassan Kanafani, Mahdi Amel and Michel Aflaq books.

Of course, such books are available in a few booths here and there. But they are being literally edged out by countless booths that sell all sorts of Salafi books and are visited by young men with thick beards and short dishdashas, sometime accompanied by face-cvoered wives in black. So much for the culture of ‘enlightenment’.

The prevailing ‘intellectual’ stance toward books, which, by the way, has nothing to do with the book INDUSTRY, is that books have either to be ‘holy’ or ‘revolutionary/political’. The reality of book markets (and cultural/information/entertainment markets), even in the ‘triumphant West’ is that they should be treated as mass markets. Without the economies of scales created by printing consumer oriented books, the niches of high culture couldn’t even exist.

Thank goodness for cookbooks, then. At least they remind us that, despite our ideological differences we still need to eat! And they keep the presses rolling.

My visit yesterday to the book fair was not a total disaster. There were some glimmers of hope.

The first glimmer is that children books are on the rise. In the stand of Al Ahlia publishers, there was a big selection of Arabic children’s science and nature books (translated from international editions). And at the Majdalawi stand I found a huge selection of English children’s books.

Also at Al Ahlia stand (I think. Again blame the lack of booth branding), one could see a diverse selection of books, ranging from the consumer oriented to the intellectual. So, despite the dominance of turath books and their endless rehashing all over the fair, one can still find the books of critical Arab thinkers like Arkoon, Jabiri and Co.

Apart from cookbooks, other consumer oriented categories are also a reason for hope. Technology/computing as well as self help books also seem to be multiplying in numbers, which is a healthy sign for the industry.

A bad sign for the industry is that electronic publishing still seems to be absent from the scene. Only a few booths were offering CD-ROM or internet based products.

But, the most interesting encounter I had in the fair, was the booth of a new Jordanian company called Vital Edition. Their booth was totally different from the cocophony of the fair. They had neat shelves displaying some best selling English books.

These guys operate a web site, with a limited, but growing, selection of US best sellers. Your order online. No credit card needed. They charge you the US cover price and deliver it to you at home. Neat!