Company will find solutions for major concern for book publishers throughout Arab region.

ABU DHABI - Mohammed Khalaf Al Mazrouei, Director General of Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (ADACH) announced yesterday the launch of a new private company to facilitate book distribution in the region.

The company, first of its kind in the region, will begin operations soon and will provide a myriad of services to the Arab book world, starting with the development of a comprehensive database of Arabic books, both those in-and out-of-print. The database will eventually include between 150,000 and 200,000 titles.

“It is an open platform and publishers may participate in any way they want. Many of the publishers we spoke to told us that they want to focus on their business, so we will do the work they cannot do for themselves,” said Juma'a Al Qubaisi, Director of the National Library at ADACH.

ADACH will be working with newest technologies available on the market, including e-commerce and print-on-demand, to get books to customers as fast as possible. ADACH will sponsor the company for five years till it breaks even or becomes profitable.

Dr. Axel Goehler, consulting and interim manager of the company said in a media gathering held on the sideline of the 20th Abu Dhabi International Book Fair “we did a survey of some 600 Arabic-language publishers, and we discovered that many of the books get lost, just go out of print without getting distributed. Just 2% of them were happy with their distribution.
Distribution has been a major concern for book publishers in the region for a long time and we aim to provide a solution.”

The plan is to use ISBN’s as the basis for record-keeping, but if that proves to challenging, due to the large number of titles lacking ISBNs, ADD may develop its own proprietary system.

The company will not function as either a wholesaler or a third-party distributor, as would be customary in the United States and Europe, but will develop its own model, one that is “specific to the region,” said Koehler. “The company will function as an intermediary between Arab publishers and regional distributors, covering the GCC countries, the Maghreb and the Levant, as well as servicing Arab communities outside the region.”

So far, the company has had talked with 30 publishing houses representing between 40-50,000 titles and is looking to settle on terms of business, sign contracts and then begin first deliveries of books in January 2011.

The company will develop seasonal sales catalogs of books and build local sales teams in major cities throughout the region.