On the third Saturday of every month, Hadiah invites over a group of friends, including some co-workers, for tea and a book discussion. The book, either fiction or nonfiction, is selected by the 15 or so regular members of the book club through a discussion on a WhatsApp group.
It was in the early 2000s, not long after the start of the publication of the monthly magazine Al-Kotob Wighat Nazr, an Egypt book review magazine launched by Cairo publisher Dar Al-Shorouk in February 1999 and lasting until January 2010, that Hadiah, a translator, thought about starting the book club with her husband Maher.
“The magazine was certainly the first inspiration behind the idea, but that was also a moment when many new writers were coming onto the scene and many new publishers were enriching the book market with many different books,” she recalled.
At the time, Hadiah and Maher had just got married, and they had decided to allocate an entire room in their new house as a reading room, something that was not very common at the time. “We both love reading books; this is what got us together when we were introduced at [a social-sports] club,” she recalled. “We talked about books, and eventually we got married,” she added.
The love of reading books, especially fiction, was something shared by the couple and their friends. “Back then, we would all buy every new book that would come out, and when we met, we would talk about the books. As a result, we decided to have our own book club,” Hadiah said.
Today, the group of friends meeting at the Saturday book club has become smaller as people have become busy with work and family responsibilities, making it hard for them to be regular readers. There have also been two other significant changes: the selection of books and reading fashions.
Hadiah explained that for the club while the first decade of the 2000s was mostly about fiction, especially the new generation of Egyptian novelists, the second decade was mostly dedicated to history and memoirs. “I think this was the impact of the 25 January Revolution in which we all took part. We started reading more about the country’s political and social history,” she said.
The selections, she added, covered old and new releases.
Up until the time of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020-2021, the remaining members of the book club were committed to buying print editions. However, Hadiah said that during these years, with people being very selective about where they went and who they engaged with, more opted for electronic reading.
“Some of us got Kindle devices, and others were just buying books online and reading them on tablets or iPads,” she said. “Today, some of us still prefer to read printed books while others have got used to reading online,” she recalls.
With financially rewarding careers, the members of the Saturday Book Club have the means to continue buying the books they like to read even as prices have increased dramatically, from an average of under LE50 for a novel in the early 2000s to the current average of around LE250.
However, this is not the case for everyone, especially for the younger generations.
BUDGETS: Ahmed was looking through the publications of the General Egyptian Book Organisation (GEBO) during this week’s 57th edition of the Cairo International Book Fair (CIBF).
At the beginning of his engineering career and with considerable financial responsibilities, Ahmed does not have a generous budget for book shopping, even with the average 20 per cent discount offered by most publishers at this year’s fair.
“This year, I made a decision not to buy books from private-sector publishers, as they are too expensive for my budget,” Ahmed said. The decision came after two years of a reduced shopping list and a parallel introduction to the world of Abjjad, an online platform to download and read books.
At the CIBF this week, Ahmed was moving among the government publishers like GEBO and the GACP (General Authority for Cultural Palaces) to buy what he qualified as “some very interesting and really affordable titles”. On his second day at the CIBF this week, Ahmed had spent a little over LE1,000 on nine books.
“This amount would not have covered more than three to four books maximum if I was buying from private publishers,” he said.
Speaking ahead of the CIBF, several private sector publishers said that their pricing decisions are defined by the cost of production, the royalties for the authors, and the profit margin for the publishing houses. “Publishing is a thriving industry in Egypt, but it is not a cheap industry at all,” said Khaled Lotfi of Tanmia, a private publisher.
“In an Egyptian bookstore today, one can find a large variety of new titles, both by Egyptian and Arab authors, and also a big selection of translations of recent titles, but of course they are not inexpensive,” he added.
For this year’s CIBF, several publishers said they had expanded discounts to many more titles than before to encourage interested readers who wish to purchase them. Still, according to Hassan, “despite the discounts, the books remain quite expensive, at least for students and other people with limited budgets for book shopping.”
In his graduation year at the Faculty of Commerce, Hassan decided to limit his shopping to government publishers. As for the private publishers, he said, he would only “surf around and take note of the titles” and wait until they are made available in “copies”.
“Copies” is the term that many people use to refer to the pirated copies that at times take down the price of a book by half or two-thirds.
Omar is a popular provider of inexpensive copies. He operates on one of two schemes. The first is providing copies of popular titles and having them offered for sale online. The second is providing printing and binding services for regular customers who wish to read specific books and can get hold of a soft copy of them “one way or another”.
“Some may say that providing these copies is unfair to publishers and authors, but in fact this is only one side of the story. The other side is that we help make these writers and their books better known,” Omar said. Eventually, he added, some sales are made through “the inexpensive line” and others are made through “regular bookstores”.
“Without us, many people would not be able to read the books they wish to read, especially if we are talking about recent titles that come out across the Arab world, translated books, or books in foreign languages,” Omar said.
“Books that are published by Arab publishers outside Egypt are quite expensive, and this is why we often try to have an Egypt edition that is less costly,” Lotfi said.
Meanwhile, to help provide French classics at affordable prices, in October last year the Diwan bookstore and publisher launched its line of Egypt-edition French books after an agreement signed with Paris publisher Gallimard to publish books from its Folio collection.
According to Brigitte Boulad, head of the project, “the idea is to help interested readers to overcome the hindrances imposed by the currency devaluation that made some books very expensive for many” in Egypt.
Neither Tanmia nor Diwan are promising inexpensive prices for the Egypt editions, however. All they promise are “more affordable” ones.
READING HABIT: For Noha, a teacher at a public school in Cairo, these prices are still not exactly affordable, “not even when offered at a discounted price at the book fair or online”.
On average, during the school year when she is busy with work and family obligations, Noha reads on average two books a month. This number increases to three to four books a month during the summer vacation. For her, she said, the cost of a monthly subscription for unlimited reading is around the price of one book.
At a younger age, in the early 2000s, Noha was growing up in the Delta city of Tanta. “At the time, we were privileged to have initiatives like ‘Reading for All’ [Al-Qeraa lil-gami’] and the ‘Family Library’ [Maktabet Al-Ussra] that provided many titles at inexpensive prices,” she said.
She added that it was such initiatives that got her and many others into the reading habit.
“I don’t have a public library near to my house or my workplace, and I don’t have the time to go to a public library that is far from where I live, especially as it is unlikely that I would find a selection of recent publications there,” Noha said. For her, Abjjad has become the online public library with a subscription she has been searching for.
It was in 2013 that Abjjad came out as a readers’ platform, basically an online book club for people who shared an interest in specific genres of books and specific titles. Four years down the road, Abjjad took things a step further and evolved into a subscription-based reading platform.
With over 35,000 titles now available online and a monthly subscription for unlimited reading at LE250 per month, Abjjad has been acquiring more and more members. “I think it is fair to say that Abjjad came to fill a gap for people who love to read but who were becoming uneasy about the prices of books,” said Yasser Al-Zahhar of Abjjad.
Al-Zahhar explained that the books available for subscribers include 22 main genres. These, he added, come with over 100 secondary ones. “This categorisation is helpful for readers to pick and choose, and it also encourages them to venture further with titles that they would not normally have gone for because they are all part of the subscription anyway.”
The books made available on Abjjad include a wide range of older and newer titles to the satisfaction of subscribers. “It has kept my reading habit in place, or almost, without over-stretching my budget,” said Noha.
Prior to getting an Abjjad subscription, Noha used Hindawi Books, a non-profit platform that makes over 40,000 books available for free reading online. They include the full collections of early and mid-20th century authors like Taha Hussein, Naguib Mahfouz, and Tawfik Al-Hakim. They also provide a wide range of books of different genres that are either obtained by the Hindawi organisation or offered by the people who hold the copyrights.
Hindawi started its free service in 2007. Today, it cooperates with several online-reading outlets and negotiates publication rights for the benefit of interested readers.
According to an assessment shared late last year by the World Population Review, Egyptians are number one in the average number of books they read among the populations of all the Arab states, with an average of over five books a year.
But Hafez, an online seller of used books, takes this figure with a pinch of salt. “I am not sure about this figure. I think avid readers consume more than 24 books a year, at an average of two books a month, while those who do not really read maybe read a book every other month,” he said.
Hafez added that he was not sure about comparing the reading habits of Egyptians to others in the Arab world. “It is difficult to compare because today a great deal of reading is related to financial resources, and this leaves Egyptian readers at a disadvantage,” he said.
Whatever the average number of books that an Egyptian reader reads per month, Hafez, who has been in the business for over 20 years, argues that there are times of increase and times of recession.
“I think the publication of interesting titles that go viral on social media, especially with the TikTok bloggers, give a boost to sales — and not just for the title in question but also for the books of the specific author and of similar books in general,” he said.
Overall, all involved in the book industry today, from top publishers to the providers of used books or pirated copies, agree that there is much more to be done to encourage more people to read.
This, they also agree, is not just a matter of making books more affordable but is also a matter of promoting reading as a habit from a very young age.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 29 January, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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