Cairo publisher finds model for Arabic e-books

The e-book revolution in the Middle East will be on mobile phones, says the founder of the largest Arabic e-publisher.

Ramy Habeeb, the founder and director of Kotobarabia, standing, at the firm's e-data factory in Cairo.

Do not hold your breath for Kindle. When the e-book revolution comes to the Middle East, it will take place on mobile phones, says the founder of the largest Arabic e-publisher. Ramy Habeeb, the founder and director of Kotobarabia, the Cairo-based publisher of more than 4,000 Arabic e-books, says mobile phones' deep market penetration in the region, combined with the most popular e-book readers' high price tags and inability to read Arabic's right-to-left script, make the mobile an obvious choice.

"I do not foresee the Arab industry jumping into e-readers," Mr Habeeb says. "I see them jumping into mobile books or reading books on their mobile phones. "I do not think the Kindle's success could be replicated in the Arab world unless you had major education backing, as in every student having their text books on the device." Kotobarabia signed a deal in July to create the first Arabic mobile book reader with Blackbetty Mobilmedia, a Viennese company that creates the software to make books readable on mobile phones.

The partners plan to present a prototype of the new Arabic mobile e-book reader at next month's Frankfurt Book Fair. "Providing Arabic typesetting on electronic devices is not that easy," says Jorg Hotter, the chief executive of Blackbetty. "It's not supported by many devices, so we are working on ways to bring this through." Once the typesetting hurdle is cleared, Blackbetty and Kotobarabia plan to roll out a premium SMS billing system in which e-book purchases would show up on a buyer's phone bill, similar to the method Blackbetty is already using in Germany.

"We are starting now with Vodafone in Germany, which is our partner, and of course are planning to implement it with Vodafone in Egypt and other mobile networks across the region," Mr Hotter says. Kotobarabia already has a relationship with Vodafone in Egypt. Two weeks ago, it became an affiliate of Sarmady, a popular Egyptian internet portal that was acquired by Vodafone last year. Sarmady, which attracts more than 100 million unique visitors to its digital network each month, plans to drive new traffic to Kotobarabia's site. And once Kotobarabia's site is getting about 5,000 visitors a day, the portal will sell and share the profits with the publisher, according to Con O'Donnel, the managing director of Sarmady.

These two new sources of revenue would be a huge boost for Kotobarabia, which launched its groundbreaking online e-book store in 2005 but is still searching for a sustainable business model to make its publishing efforts less dependent on the company's more profitable Arabic document digitisation arm. "The benefit and the curse of working in the Arab world in e-publishing is that we have no one to model ourselves after," says Mr Habeeb, an Egyptian-American who grew up in Bahrain and became interested in e-books while working in Japan.

His original dream had been to create an Arabic version of Amazon, the maker of the Kindle e-reader, but he soon found that mailing physical books was too expensive. "The shipping costs were prohibitive and then you run the risk of problems at the borders," Mr Habeeb says. In addition to skirting censorship, the electronic model bypasses the largest problem in the Arabic publishing world: the lack of a distribution system.

Last year, the company conducted a study of 150 titles, ranging from the most popular to first-time authors, and found that 80 per cent of them were only available within a 5km radius of their publishing house. "In other words, these books were only available where publishers could physically carry the books on their backs, which means they weren't even available in Alexandria, let alone the UAE," he says.

"So we felt that e-publishing was the best way to cross borders and get the content out on a mass scale." Because few Arabic publishers consider the electronic rights of their books, about 80 per cent of Kotobarabia's authors contract directly with the company. Since many of these do not have usable word files of their books, about 20 out of Kotobarabia's staff of 110 work around the clock retyping, and many cases scanning, the original books.

In May, the company made the bold step of switching from a traditional e-book vendor to a subscription service. "It was a strategic decision," Mr Habeeb said. "What we were finding was that it was the same books getting bought over and over again and a lot of authors on our site would get nothing. "So on a subscription basis, the reader gets the benefits of a number of titles they are aware of, but it gives smaller authors a chance to be read."

The subscription model also offers possibilities in the mobile realm that can't be realised in more developed markets, Mr Hotter says. "We tried to establish a subscription in Europe but we couldn't because we have book price regulation, so we are not allowed to sell books in a subscription," he says. "We think there is a great opportunity to offer a subscription fee for readers, like $10 a month, and then they would get access to our full catalogue."