Egypt: From Blogs to Books

A blog is just a media, and its content can be news, reports, political analysis, or photographs. Some bloggers also publish their thoughts, short stories, and poems in their blogs. And now in Egypt, especially that the Cairo Book Fair will open its doors soon, many publishers are transforming some blog posts into books.

Dina El Hawary – Dido's Life – decided to write about this phenomenon:

وظهر في العقد الأول من الألفية الثانية حركة أدبية حديثة – لم يعرفها الناس من قبل – عرفت باسم التدوين، واتخذت الحركة أشكالاً متنوعة من الكتابة على مواقع التدوين المختلفة المتاحة على الشبكة العنكبوتية
وتطورت الحركة الأدبية سريعاً بمساعدة جيل المدونين الأول حتى توجت في عام 2008
باقبال كبرى دور النشر في مصر على تحويل المدونات الإلكترونية إلى أعمال أدبية في شكل كتب منشورة
وبدأت حركة النشر بكتاب أرز باللبن لشخصين للكاتبة رحاب بسام – و كتاب أما هذه فرقصتي أنا للكاتبة غادة محمد

In the first decade of the third millennium a new kind of artistic movement has emerged – a movement that wasn't known before – and it's now known as blogging. The writings in this movement took different shapes on the various blogging sites available on the web.
The movement has evolved quickly with the help of the first generation of bloggers, till the year 2008 when big publishing houses started to transform blogs into books.
They started by publishing “Rice With Milk”, by Rehab Bassam [Ar], and “This is My Story”, by Ghada Muhammad.

*****

Notes:
1. This is not the first time for the contents of a blog to be published in a book. El Naby El Afriqy [Ar] – The African Prophet – is another blog by Mina Guerges that was published in a book a while ago.
2. Rice with Milk, Rice Pudding, or Rozz Belabban, is an Egyptian dessert.

6 comments

  • And then some of us actually publish proper books under Creative Commons licenses! Not that I’d expect this particular one to be likely to see publication in this part of the world anytime soon…

  • Bangladesh has already done it in February 2007. The first collection of blog posts from Bangla blogging platform somewherein.com were published (in Bangla language) in Ekushey Book fair in February 2007. The title of the book was “Oporbastob”. Two more individual publications of books were published one of them was titles ‘Shuvo’s Blogging’.

    This year a sequel to Oporbastob and more such books will be published.

    Meanwhile I have reported in GV about E-Books published by the bloggers (in Bangla).

  • […] on almost everyone’s wish list this year. As Tarek Amr mentioned in his Global Voices Online post Egypt: From blogs to books, this year marks at least three main blogs transferred into books, for Rehab Bassam, Ghada Mahmoud […]

  • Three Years Blogging…

    My first blog post was in the 19th of February 2005 , and since then I’ve met many bloggers and read…

  • […] at the start of 2008 when Dar El Shorouk (A famous Egyptian press house) adopted the trend of transforming blogs into books. They started by 3 books “Rice with Milk” by Rehab Bassam [Ar], “This is my […]

  • […] El Shorouk (nota casa editrice del Paese), che, all'inizio del 2008, ha sposato la tendenza a trasformare i blog in libri. È partita con tre volumi, “Rice with milk” di Rehab Bassam, “This is my […]

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