Buying into the reading culture Ulterior motive According to Siham Al-Qahtani, if books were not banned on the normal market, the seasonal book fair would not be so popular. Riyadh Book Fair: Three million visitors, SR35 million-worth of books, but how many readers? THE annual Riyadh Book Fair which closed earlier this month registered sales worth SR35 million from the three million individuals who visited during the 10 days of the event. But what do those figures mean, other than suggesting that Saudi individuals have unlimited purchasing power when it comes to books? Do they hint at an increasing interest in reading to the extent that people are willing to travel across the expanse of the country to attend events such as the Book Fair? Or have books merely become another target of the rampant consumerism so evident in other aspects of society? Al-Hayat Arabic daily asked the public and critics what it all signifies. “I think it goes to show an increased cultural awareness in Saudi society,” said Solaiman Al-Dhahyan. “In the sixties and seventies they used to say that books were written in Egypt, printed in Beirut and read in Iraq, but today we can see from the statistics that the Riyadh Book Fair is the biggest selling book fair in the Arab World. While that might display the buying power of individual Saudis, that power alone is not enough to make someone buy something. They also have to want to buy it, and won't do so if they don't feel the object has something of value in it that makes it worth buying. That's why I'm optimistic that Saudi culture and thought has a bright future. “Just the openness to reading itself will have a significant impact on shaping minds and producing a new awareness and a new society,” he said. “No one can deny that it bears fruits, and even though we might differ over the size or type or expanse of those fruits, they are there all the same. I believe that people's intellectual awareness of the rights of others and their openness towards them are still limited, and that's because awareness of those things is seen mostly in the cultured elite of society who read and study. It doesn't become a more widespread part of social culture until two factors are in place: until that same elite familiarizes that awareness and speaks out, and until that awareness and culture is actually practiced in reality.” Quantity means quality Sahmi Al-Hajari agrees that whatever the consumerist motives of the sales figures, only good can arise from them. Salih Ziyad said, however, that without proper scrutiny, it will remain unclear whether the book fair sales figures signify massive consumerism or greater “ambition and seriousness for learning”. “What types of books sold the most, and what sort of readers bought them?” he wondered. “Did they buy the books for purposes of research or other academic activity and to get high-level certificates, or was it for other purposes, such as personal reading?” Shatyawi Al-Ghaithi said that many persons had admitted to him that they hadn't read even a quarter of the books they bought at the previous year's book fair in Riyadh. “There are three reasons for the high sales figures,” he said. “One, a consumerist mentally in society; two, the difficult access to those books because of bans on books despite the widening of the margins of freedom, and three, the Riyadh Book Fair has become something of a cultural festival along the lines of the increasing number of other cultural festivals held for special occasions or without a specific occasion.” Al-Ghaithi also noted that books that sold well at the fair were frequently those with “sensationalist titles”. “That includes novels that fall in the category of the ‘banned trilogy' of subjects: sex, religion and politics, as well as books bought simply because the author is famous,” he said. No reading development plan Siham Al-Qahtani said that if books were not banned on the normal market, the seasonal book fair would not be so popular. “A culture of reading, or the gains to be made from reading which produce individual awareness of respect for the freedom of other people's views and behavior, and the belief in multiculturalism, is not related to the number of books we buy,” he said. “If that were the case then Saudi society would be in the front row of the most advanced peoples. Instead it's related to other things, such as the interest in reading, encouraging children and teenagers to read, promoting the values of reading. Everyone knows that public libraries sit virtually abandoned, and you can find Saudi cities without any libraries at all. We have no development plan for reading.” Critic Muhammad Al-Abbas is forthright in his assessment of the visit and sales figures: “They are nothing but numbers and don't mean anything on a cultural level,” he said. “Figures are always misleading and require close and objective study and analysis...it seems to be an official policy every year to make a display of the number of visitors and sales figures as if the credibility of the fair is somehow derived from those indicators and not cultural ones.” He described the event as “just another episode in the flimsy vision of what the organization sees as culture”. “The culture of reading does not exist as is claimed. What we see is merely an auction, a marketing and purchasing-fest, a competition for the title of ‘reader' or ‘person of culture',” he said. He added that the true effect of reading results in changes in “behavior and practices” and that books should “shake your world, if not change your whole life completely”. “That's something we don't see in this society or on the cultural scene in the slightest,” he said. “Everything man has thought and felt can be found in books, and the only people who genuinely seek a better meaning for life embrace that treasure trove.”
