By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn
IN the midst of a general sense of insecurity spawned by terrorist attacks and the gloom spurred by spiralling inflation, something rejuvenating happened in Karachi last week.
The Pakistan Publishers and Booksellers Association held its Fourth Karachi International Book Fair much to the delight of bibliophiles.
Continue reading Creating a book culture?
By Zubeida Mustafa
“Predicting the death of the book industry since the invention of the gramophone has not been something unusual. Every time a new invention comes along like the gramophone, the radio, film, television and, of course lately, the computer, the pundits of doom predict the death of the book. And what happens? I can’t speak for every country of the world, but, certainly as an English language publisher I see the number of books sold every year growing spectacularly. The number goes up and up. Look at the Harry Potter phenomenon. I mean it is just incredible. Who could have predicted that this children’s book about sorcerers and wizards would have sold in huge quantities in the most unlikely places,” observes Simon Bell.
Bell, the international director of the Publishers’ Association, UK, was on his first trip to Pakistan recently. He spoke enthusiastically about the book trade in not just Britain but also in Pakistan.
“I feel there is an enormous potential in the book trade here. You have so many elements that are essential for a thriving book market: a very sizable population, tremendous growth, a growing middle class, extensive use of the English language in the education system. Of course we know, it is never going to be the size of India because India has a huge population but Pakistan has the potential to be a real power house. In addition to that, in many ways, I think the trade in Pakistan is very well developed. We have some excellent distributors and some excellent potential partners here. Some excellent publishing is taking place in Pakistan in all languages spoken here.”
Simon Bell’s impressions should be seen against the backdrop of the Association he works for. The Publishers’ Association is the trade body which represents the interests of 180 British publishers at home and overseas. It includes the giants like Penguin Books and Random House and the small ones with barely 10-15 people on their staff. An important service that Bell provides is giving market intelligence service to the members of the Association. He attends major book fairs abroad and gives his partners information on books that are selling around the world.
For British publishers the foreign book trade is very important, given the small size of their own market. The Association sends its representatives to different countries to speak to local publishers, local booksellers, the trade bodies, the publisher’s associations, the booksellers association, people in the government, people in education to get a picture of what the market is like and will be in the future. The fact is that the spread of the English language has opened new opportunities to publishers in Britain.
In that respect the British publishing industry is quite unique. Unlike in other parts of the world, British publishers have great scope because they are publishing in a language which many people are learning and using as their second or third language worldwide. It means that their export markets are really big.
“If you look at the worldwide picture, British book exports are a very valuable sector of the book industry as a whole. They account for at least 30 or 35 per cent of our overall book sales. The exports market is worth about 1.3 billion pounds of the total market of about three billion pounds, at least,” Bell remarks.
Classified in three categories, the British publications are doing well. One third are academic books (scientific, technical, medical, business and computer books), one third are school books (including English language teaching books) and the remaining third are trade/consumer books that is fiction and books for the general reader.
American publishers also bring out books in English but with their huge market they do not have to depend on exports as much as the British. According to Bell, the American school books are not exported in such large numbers as the British books. Their trade books, that are dominated by publications on business, computer science and psychology, are sold abroad in comparable numbers but their market is different. British publishers focus on India and Pakistan, countries in English-speaking Africa and the Commonwealth. The Americans turn to East Asia, Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines.
A marked difference between the American and the British book trade is in the number of titles published in a year. The Americans publish considerably fewer titles but get greater sales out of those titles whereas in the UK the publishers seem to spread themselves rather thin and publish a greater number of titles.
Another interesting feature which should perhaps be instructive for Pakistani and Indian publishers is that of co-production. If a British publisher has the copyright to a book which he is going to publish in Britain and his established markets overseas but is not strong in the American market, he would look for a co-publisher in America. If it is a particularly attractive title he may even approach a number of publishers and get them to bid as one does in an auction. The deal will be struck with the one offering the best bargain.
Then the two publishers will divide their territorial rights, with the Americans typically marketing the book in America and East Asia. The British publisher would have territorial rights in the Commonwealth countries, while the two may accept other parts of the world as an open market.
Simon Bell identifies piracy as the biggest problem the book trade faces anywhere. Two factors fundamental to piracy are availability and price. If it is not even possible to get hold of a book in Pakistan and it is badly needed the pirates will step in to fill the vacuum and describe it as a service they are rendering society. Price is another key issue. If books are made available at a high price beyond the reach of the local pockets, it is inevitable that a low cost pirated copy will be made available.
Now this is a problem which publishers have been struggling to resolve for quite a number of years. Recently, there have been some very serious efforts to reduce the prices of books to make them much more affordable. Instead of having a single edition of a book, a number of cheaper editions will be produced for certain parts of the world at lower production costs.
Bell believes this is only the beginning of the war against piracy. “Piracy undoubtedly has an opportunity to show its head when books are overpriced in the market. So I think this is the responsibility of the copyright holder/publisher to come up with solutions which in a large market like Pakistan enable it to be priced appropriately for that market, so the people can afford it. It’s no good having a campaign in which the emphasis is simply on enforcement of law. Sending people out to the booksellers and the bazars to raid premises to recover pirated books is only one part of the picture. After all the problem of affordability still remains. Raising public awareness of piracy again, I think, is a partial solution. Any campaign to combat piracy needs a multiple approach and price is certainly one of the social elements in that.”
He says that Pakistan is probably one of the countries which has the most piracy. “I think in Pakistan there is a problem of the representatives of the foreign book trade not coming here frequently enough to visit the market and discuss the needs of the booksellers, the distributors and the buyers. We need to increase our visits to Pakistan. I mean, after all, a lot of publishers visit India. And it’s not so too far away. Ideally I think that as the market in Pakistan grows what should happen is that they should have a proper local presence on the spot. If you look at the market in India, for example, the major publishers have proper operations in India. In Pakistan, I think there is only one significant British publisher with a very significance presence in this part of the world,” says Bell.
“It is our estimate that in Pakistan the loss to piracy of English language books is between 80 and 90 per cent. That is one reason why the legal sale is fairly small in this part of the world. We take the problem seriously because Pakistan is a member of the WTO. Actually the situation in Pakistan is not irretrievable. The legal framework is in reasonable shape, unlike other parts of the world where there is anarchy. Besides Pakistan is a signatory to the copyright conventions,” Bell observes.
He feels that piracy is undermining the trade and if the publishing industry is to grow, it is piracy that must be first addressed.
Source: Dawn
By Zubeida Mustafa
London has a new landmark. The British Library. Opened to the public five years ago, it has emerged as a major crowd-puller in the British metropolis. That is not at all surprising for it combines on its premises the beauty of its architecture, the aesthetic delicacy of its decor and the wealth of its collected treasures to attract even the most ‘unliterary’ of people. You don’t have to be a bibliophile or a scholar looking for reference material to visit the library, though 431,000 of its visitors last year were readers who had come to consult its books. But nearly as many came just to have a look around and marvel at what they saw.
Continue reading ARTICLES: Ancient treasure of knowledge
By Zubeida Mustafa
IN these turbulent times when the Middle East is up in flames, Dr Elise Young’s interpretation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is remarkably insightful and, coming from a Jew, radical. She learnt about her people’s history from her own family, but felt sceptical when as a historian and scholar she was trained to analyze the events of the past dispassionately. As a feminist, who feels keenly for the sufferings of other women, she felt compelled to probe deeper into the experiences of women in Palestine — both Muslim and Jew. As a peace activist, she had the strong urge to stop violence. All these qualities have combined to make Elise Young what she is today.
Young teaches history at the Westfield State College, Massachusetts, USA. She has recorded the findings of her research in her book, Keepers of history: women and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In a nutshell, Elise Young’s provocative thesis states that the Jewish and Muslim women in Palestine have had a long history of cooperative relationship, which has transcended conventional andocentric nationalism. According to her it was the politics of nationalism, class, race and gender which has manifested itself in the form of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Explaining the underlying theme of her book, Young writes:
“The basic understanding of feminism, that the fate of all women is interconnected, is a bridge between Israeli and Palestinian women polarized by those forces that have brought Jew and Arab to this battlefield….. The purpose of this book is to bring into the foreground critical connections between gender, race, and class as they inform historic and current developments of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Women are ‘keepers of history’; feminist critique is the basis for politics that can transform the deadlock between Israeli and Palestinian, ‘Jew’ and ‘Arab’.”
I met Young in Westfield where she had organized a conference of Pakistani and Indian women under the aegis of the Global Women’s History Project of which she is the founder and director. Her thinking is so different from the American mainstream opinion on the Middle East. She set up her project to bring together women from different sides of a conflict and help them see their situation from the perspective of history. She has already organized meetings of women of Palestine and Israel, South Africa and Ireland. A strong believer in non-violence — she wakes up before dawn every day to perform yoga for three hours before she starts her day’s work — she feels convinced that all conflicts can be resolved peacefully.
I was curious to know what provoked her interest in the Palestinian issue? And what made her so different from the majority of the Jews in America who are staunchly pro-Israel? Until the end of the sixties Young’s activism had focussed on the anti-Vietnam war protest, the civil rights movement and feminist causes. Her personal experiences and impressions in her first visit to Israel to meet relatives in 1971 made her interested in the region.
“I found the Israeli state highly militarized,” Young remarks (and that went against her pacifist nature). “The link between the military and racism deeply penetrated into my consciousness when an Israeli soldier boasted at length about how he would protect me from the Arabs only to follow me with a knife in an unsuccessful attempt to molest me. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 sharpened my interest in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Many questions came to my mind and I found my knowledge highly Euro-centric. What were the roots of anti-Semitism? What were the forces of dissension that disrupted the long-standing links between the Muslim, Jewish and Christian civilizations?”
Her quest for knowledge took her to Birzeit university in 1985. She was to study the holocaust and how the subject was taught in Israeli academia. But she found the universities too restrictive and regimented, Her favourite theme — relations between the Israeli and Arab women — continued to haunt her. The director of the women’s studies programme at Birzeit, Islah Jad, was a mine of information on the subject.
“Until then I never thought of writing a book. Then one day I visited a refugee camp with a Palestinian guide and met her aunt who had been there since 1948. When I heard the woman speak of her travails, it dawned on me that there is a feminist perspective to the conflict which has not been analyzed. Then she quoted an Arabic proverb saying that the five fingers of the hand are not equal,” Young says.
Thus Young got involved with the Palestinian women’s struggle. She met and travelled with Sarwar Nijab Khatib in 1987, the year of the first intifada, and co-founded the Middle East Peace Coalition. She has a profound understanding of the Israeli women’s perspective and speaks of the exploitation of the woman under Zionism. Though they struggled with the men for Israel, they found themselves driven back into the kitchen when the Zionist state was founded. She cites the election of Golda Meir as the prime minister as the biggest defeat of the Israeli women’s movement. She was coopted by the male leadership which bypassed Ada Maimon, the leader of the Israeli Working Women’s Union.
She speaks lucidly about the direct connection between race and gender in Israel. The Jews were Arab racially and had lived with the Muslims in Palestine for centuries. Zionism was a Europe-centred movement and was used by the European Jews to set up a state for themselves in Palestine. Today Israel is a racist state in which the European Jews who migrated to Palestine oppress the indigenous Jewish inhabitants.
“The Jewish identity in Israel is multi-layered,” she observes. “Factors such as gender, race and class interests are involved. Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been promoted as a smokescreen to conceal the Israeli patriarchal state which seeks to control women and to perpetuate the hierarchical class structures,” she argues compellingly.
When her book was published in 1992, it received positive reviews in women’s journals. However the mainstream Jewish opinion was not moved. Some even denounced her as a traitor while others thought it paradoxical because they saw the truth in what she said. But found it in conflict with what they had learned from childhood. Her book is now out of print but there is no proposal to print a second edition. “It is difficult for women to get their books published if they do not conform to mainstream opinion, and I hardly hold such views” she says.
Her parents migrated to America from Eastern Europe. She now wants to study the radicalization of the Jewish garment workers and their links with Zionism.
For Young, the violence on the West Bank is devastating. “Revenge killings of the kind being witnessed in Palestine every day will not bring peace,” she insists. “The Jews have always been trained to think of themselves as victims in history. This is a dangerous concept which has encouraged them to take positions without accepting responsibility for their action.” Where, in her view, does the solution lie? Without hesitating she says:
She denounces the Oslo process and says it is now defunct. “There is need to reconceptualize issues to find a feasible solution. Zionism must end because as a Jew I believe it doesn’t provide me any security. Anti-Semitism must be addressed in the local milieu. In Israel and Palestine, the Jews and Muslims have lived together for ages. By setting up a new grassroots infrastructure, they could connect to each other. There is need for them to connect which they are doing in a small and sporadic way, the troubles notwithstanding. These groups should form the nucleus of a wider network to join these areas together,” Young says.
Source: Dawn
By Zubeida Mustafa
VICTORIA Schofield shot into the limelight in Pakistan when she visited this country to attend the trial of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1978-79. The outcome of this visit was the book, Bhutto: Trial and Execution. Published in 1979 by Cassell, it was the first book to cover an event which was a landmark in Pakistan’s turbulent history. With the press stifled under a blanket of pre-censorship imposed by General Ziaul Haq, the people were starved for news. Schofield’s book attracted much attention and the copies which managed to find their way into the country were immediately doing the rounds to meet the demands of voracious readers.
There has to be a compelling reason for a Western writer to get interested in South Asia. In Schofield’s case the reason was her “friendship with Benazir Bhutto”, a contemporary at Oxford where the two were elected to the Oxford Union — Benazir as the president and Schofield as the librarian. When Benazir was leaving for home she invited Schofield to visit Pakistan. In the summer of 1977 came the military coup and Bhutto’s trial. Continue reading Beginning with the trial