The second Arab Publishers' Conference hosted a discussion about electronic publishing, during its two-day proceedings at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

Head of the The Arab Union for electronic publishing, Adel Khalifa, highlighted the fact that only 0.4% of global electronic publishing is in Arabic. The main risk to publishers is copyright violation and pirating of books, and the challenges of marketing this content; though he considered today's protection of content to be improved though the modern electronic books market.

The first lot of research presented was on the global e-books revolution, by Richard Charkin, head of Bloomsbury publishing. He shared data on how the E-books market has evolved dramatically over recent years, starting in 2008, when the market share of e-books hiked, a trajectory that only looks to continue. In 2000, he explained, publishers ranged from denial to disinterest, but some also wished for the change and had vision, but there was only a vague idea about Amazon, authors websites or even emails.

Now in 2013, Microsoft, Google, Apple and Amazon own the biggest Internet platforms, dwarfing the combined turnover of Random House and Penguin,somewhere in the region of 4 billion pounds, while the others are around the 40 billion pound mark, he shared. "No need to mention that these platforms have nothing to do with from the books publishing business per se," he highlighted. The world is similar in many ways, so Ebooks sales in UK is below USA but they're too close, "Some countries are faster than others, owing party to pricing strategies such as in Germany and France," he remarked.

Figures show that Ebooks consumers are very heavy book buyer, and eventually the spending per person is higher for Ebooks, Charkin shared. "E-books are more interesting because they're lighter and easier to carry than paper, and also take less space, cheaper and are instantly accessibly, but they miss the feel of printed books and enjoyment of holding them, and giving them as gifts is a real difficulty," the data showed.

"Looking into the future, sales to early adopters are going down, and that's discouraging. The new supply chain could go straight from the author to the consumer directly, but also bypassing agents and publishers etc," Charkin surprised everyone, "genres are evolving, from books to 'content' sales, such as classics which will be totally free, and then 'singles' of short stories. Reference dictionaries will disappear,"

The change is coming fast, yet nobody knows about the future, and experimenting is important without large risk, and must avoid monopolizing the business and never undervalue what is being sold just to sell more, were the concluding remarks of Richard Charkin on the topic.

Salah Shubaru is head of the Neel wa Furat website, the biggest online sale of Arabic books with half a million titles, and now going into e-publishing though their ikitab website. Their experience in Ebooks, starting with solving the challenges of e-publishing, first through solving the challenges of finding Arabic text in electronic form, so helping the publishers to move to electronic, especially texts that require enormous change from original formats to be suitable for e-publishing, including editing fonts or breaks between pages. There are also challenges in Quranic verses, formulas, footers and notes. He described the challenges related to sales and pirating yet offered no solution.

Mohamed El-Baghdadi, CEO of Al-Manhal, the first and so far only Arabic scientific content database, argued that the most important thing from his perspective is copyright protection and fighting pirating, which limits the accessibility to this market and its appeal to publishers, including how authors are rewarded for their content.

"What's required to launch this market is trusted, authoritative content that can be securely accessed and open for full-text search, as well as user management tools for students throughout their study environments," Al-Baghdadi described regarding access to scientific knowledge.

The session clearly concluded the importance of venturing into this global market, yet highlighted the serious challenges and the greater responsibility to organize action against piracy and for protection of rights.