Books

The world of books is very diverse among the various Mediterranean coasts.

If we go back to 1999, the last year of which we have data of the whole Mediterranean scope collected by UNESCO, we see that it goes from the 133 titles published in Algeria or the 386 in Morocco, up to the more than 30,000 published in Italy of the almost 60,000 published in Spain, whereas in Tunisia were published one thousand, two thousand in Croatia and three thousand in Slovenia.

In general, in the Arab World, publishing industry has a modest production, as stated the president of the Association of Arab Publishers in 2003. That is because reading has not been popular at the Arab world during the last generations; even there has been a low or very low literacy level (though the picture is changing in the last years. According to UNESCO data, if we adhere to the range of age between 15 and 24 years, we see there is only a 10% of illiterate or more in Algeria, Egypt and Morocco). In fact, traditionally there has been an important oral transmission of poems, of knowledge, of Quran...

On the other hand, on the other European side, we find a truly publishing madness: considering that books have small revenue, the more they publish the more they increase the possibility that any of them may be successful and therefore compensates the edition of all of them. This phenomenon has become a very quick vicious circle, for example in Spain where publishers explain that they have found themselves in a non-stop escalation of titles since at least one century.

It is thus very difficult to bring together information equally valuable for such different realities. The information you will find on the following tabs is of appliance especially in countries with the publishing and reading models more common at the northern shores of the Mediterranean.