In Italy nowadays you can buy a book for peanuts. The most amusing report I have read was that a publishing house in Milan had announced that certain books would be sold by the kilogram. The announcement was made at the beginning of the summer reading season. The publishing house launched an advertising campaign based on the following question: “Which is more expensive: a kilogram of Shakespeare or a kilogram of tomatoes?”
In the Arab world, books face a different fate. either they are banned or are too expensive to buy. Last week while I was in a Jeddah bookshop, I overheard a young girl complaining that the prices were “unimaginable.”
She said books prices had risen to the extent that most people could not to afford them. Another woman was almost in hysterics over the price of a book. She wondered aloud if it were not time to introduce a subsidy for books. I saw a number of women in the bookstore and I asked one of the clerks whether men or women bought more books. He answered that women did. I also discovered from talking to him that women usually looked for and bought books that required some intellectual concentration while men usually looked for easy reading - adventure tales and such. On a trip to London I bought a children’s encyclopedia which cost a pound a half. It is not necessary for children to read the same works of Shakespeare which adults read. There are a number of versions of Shakespeare especially for children. Children’s literature in the Arab world is about to vanish after the deaths of pioneers such as Kamel Al-Kailani, Muhammad Attiyya Al-Abrashi and Muhammad Said Al-Eriyan.