Issue No.589
Opinion
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6 - 12 June 2002 Issue No.589 Opinion |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Books as commodity
One phenomenon that surprises me is the absence from the market of some of our greatest authors' works: books, it seems, are offered on the market as soon as they are published and the copies of what tend to be very small editions are available only until they run out. Many established and widely respected writers have complained to me of the unavailability of their works.
The book is no doubt a commodity, but it is not a short-term, ordinary commodity, one that can be consumed and then discarded. Rather, making works available should be regarded as a long-term intellectual and cultural service, available at all times. And this is especially true for the work of major authors. It seems ludicrous that a reader looking for a novel by Youssef El- Siba'ie or a short story collection by Ihsan Abdel- Quddous should emerge from the bookshops empty- handed.
They ask for the title they want, only to be told that the book is old, that it was published in the 1960s and is not, therefore, available. Can you imagine the same thing happening with Marguerite Duras in France, or Arthur Miller in America -- a reader walking into a bookshop, only to be told that the book they want was written too long ago to be stocked?
In Egypt though, the book appears to have an expiry date. Once the first installment is consumed, no more of the product is made available. There is always another, newer product that will supposedly sell better. It is painful to feel that you've spent your life producing a commodity that has a fixed shelf-life after which it goes off, when what you thought you had been doing was writing literature.
Based on an interview by Mohamed Salmawy
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