Sunday, October 19, 2014

book piracy in the Arab world

"Creating a digital file from a printed book by scanning each page, by contrast, is a nightmare."  Ha ha. The Economist does not know about the patience and diligence of Arabs who are copying thousands of books daily and making them available for free to Arabs around the world. This is why the UN figures about book reading based on book purchases is just silly.  All the young Arabs I know read digital books (in PDF forms) on the internet. There are applications that make those books available.  Now there are some problems; I was reading one of those books (on Zionism by `Abdul-Wahab Al-Masiri) on the plane recently and once I reached the end I was horrified to discover that whoever scanned the books did not bother to scan the section of endnotes and bibliography. The horror.

PS I posted this in Arabic on Facebook and an Arabic reader sent me this comment (my translation): "For the last two weeks I have been transferring a book to PDF and just finished. Say hi to the Economist". ha ha