The e-word on everybody's lips

By Amira Howeidy
This year the book fair is in love with the e-word. We were told there would be e-books and seminars on electronic publishing, wall-to-wall Internet; it was even rumoured that an entire hall would be devoted to a wide array of e-publications. After all, the 33rd Cairo International Book Fair's main theme is "modernising Egypt."
The General Egyptian Book Organisation's (GEBO) daily advertisements announcing the seminar programmes for the day make a point of mentioning that the fair has a Web site, which is meant, of course, to provide regular information on the events' various activities. But go to www.cibf.org.eg (as indicated in the official ads), and all you get is a DNS error (until time of print). However, if you make a wild guess and instead go to www.cibf.org, which does not appear in the ads, you will get there. Although the bilingual Web site lists several sections -- "calendar", "information", "meet the intellectuals", "news" and "exhibitors" -- none are hyper-linked. The site is indeed there, but that's all there is to it.
The e-element is equally evident around the fair's grounds. Two Internet companies Nile On-line, an Internet backbone company and Future, an Internet service provider (ISP), reserved exhibition space right next to the Salah Salem street gate for their cyber cafés. A few kilometres away, right above the kushari and shawerma outlets, Egyptianetwork.com and Egyptianhosting.com display blue and yellow banners promoting their "Web hosting solutions from $9.95". But the blue kiosk that is supposed to serve as the two companies information centre remains empty.
In the first week alone at least two seminars were devoted to technology-related topics, both under very general titles -- "The future and technology" and "Electronic publishing and the Internet." On Sunday, Nile On-line's chairman Hisham El-Sherif spoke on tackling the "digital divide" that increasingly separates the technologically advanced world from developing countries. The handful of confused listeners responded by posing totally irrelevant questions. Instead of us being recipients of globalisation, why can't we be exporters of Arabisation was the general tenor of the ensuing debate.
A more focused seminar on Saturday attempted to inform a larger audience of what e-publishing is all about. The panel comprised professionals in the field, including the BBC Arabic on-line news editor Hosam El-Sokari, IT expert and managing editor of the cultural Wughat Nazar magazine Ayman El-Sayyad, regional and information technology advisor at UNESCO Tarek Shawki and Mohamed Hegazi, who heads the recently formed electronic copyrights department at the Cabinet Information and Decision Support Centre (CIDSC).
Al-Sayyad took issue with mistaken, though widely held, definitions of terms such as e-publishing and e-books.
"Please let us define such terms first," he pleaded. An e-book consists of a hand-held device and an e-reader platform to operate it. "To read a book through that device you either go to a bookstore or a Web site and download the book's software," he explained. And e-publishing, he snapped, "is not just anything that's put on a CD. If you put an application or software on a CD, that's not e-publishing. Electronic publishing is what would appear in a paper book, but in any electronic form, be it the Internet or a CD, for example."
In Egypt, he argued, e-publishing has been limited to "Bisaraha" (Honestly), a collection of Mohamed Hasanein Heikal's weekly articles published in Al-Ahram till the mid '70s, and which last year appeared on a laser disc produced by a private documentation centre. Which means, more or less, that the entire "Saraya America", supposed to be the fair's e-publishing area, is in reality simply a venue for electronic equipment vendors. Indeed, the many small pavilions clustered in the hall offered only computer keyboards, mouse-pads, HP printers, headphones, external floppy disk drives, speakers and dozens and dozens of CDs loaded with various exegeses of the Qur'an, dictionaries, encyclopedias, games and software for screen savers.
Allowing ISPs and Internet companies to promote their services at the book fair and claiming that an entire hall displays the latest in electronic publishing does make the event look rather modern. And launching a Web site, no matter how futile, reflects GEBO's recognition of the Internet as an important means of communication. Quite whether it all adds up to a shrinking of the digital divide, though, is an altogether different kettle of fish.
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