Arabic contribution?
Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks.
The Project Gutenberg has over 10,000 books legally available for download in more than 50 languages: German, French, Spanish, Afrikaan, Yiddish, … except in Arabic.
I sometimes want to look for electronic books written by famous Arabic writers in their original language : Gibran, Mina, Chebbi, … or even classical ones: Jahiz, Al-Maarri, … but I don’t find, and sometimes I find some, but published by German or American libraries!
The reason? Most Arabic people do not want to contribute for free and to see their work available for everybody; moreover, Arabic national libraries and cultural centers that are supposed to promote their culture do not really make effort to make their literature known and to help out people and researchers.
Meanwhile, I am still looking for some books, that I will not even find in p2p : They simply don’t exist in electronic format.
May 7th, 2006 at 7:02 pm
Shit ! I never thought about that ..
Pourtant c po trop dur .. juste une chtite volonté du coté des maisons d’édition pr kon puisse de délecter des récits de Mina ..
May 7th, 2006 at 7:57 pm
Echoes from the Tunisian blogosphere
Swobodin writes about how Project Gutenberg has over 10,000 books legally available for download in more than 50 languages, yet none of them are in Arabic. He goes on to talk about the inexistence of any Arabic books in an electronic format, and how A…
May 7th, 2006 at 8:04 pm
Volonty?
I don’t think it depends on commercial Arabic publishers, but we, users, readers, libraries, …
May 9th, 2006 at 9:57 pm
I can give many links about e-books
May 10th, 2006 at 1:58 pm
Sure I want to get, as long as they are “legal”.
Thanks and regards
May 22nd, 2006 at 1:21 am
You’re looking in the wrong place. Try:
http://www.almeshkat.net/books/index.php
http://alwaraq.com/
and you’ll find enough free, legal (if mostly medieval) Arabic books to last you a lifetime.
May 22nd, 2006 at 12:02 pm
Thanks Lameen for the links, however, it was not really useful.
The first contains only religious books, they are available everywhere, I am looking for literature and poetry.
As for the second, it’s only compatible with Internet Explorer, I only work on GNU/Linux, so I won’t install another OS to open the links
Thanks anyway, and welcome to my space!
July 29th, 2006 at 6:20 pm
Hello
It is a very unpleasent fact that there are nobody wants to contribute in presenting books in Arabic for free… although there are a lot of books considered to be in the public domain … i was thinking of making a small project to type the books available for free and publish it in HTML, PDF, TXT … pretty similar to the great Project Gutenberg …
mm
July 31st, 2006 at 5:06 pm
Hi alnotka,
Did you start? are there some available for download? May you give some links?
Thanks and best regards
August 1st, 2006 at 11:07 pm
Hello
I’m working now on the first book to be published, It will take sometime…
أثر العرب فى الحضارة الأوروبية - عباس محمود العقاد
Here the address in which I will use to publish the books on it…
If you have any ideas .. contact me…
August 2nd, 2006 at 12:33 pm
Congratulations for your new blog! You should allow non-blogger comment meamwhile; well, it’s up to you.
Aside from plain text UTF-8 files, you can add HTML files too; nvu is an excellent tool to handle it, yet free software.
As for PDF, how about ArabTeX?
Keep up the good work.
Regards,
August 3rd, 2006 at 11:21 am
Thanks
Once the text is completed in UTF-8 format .. We can play with it whatever we want …
The problem I am having now is with blogger .. I cannot find an Arabic RTL template … If you know a template works for blogger please tell me
August 3rd, 2006 at 11:54 am
My answer is here
August 5th, 2006 at 2:12 pm
Hello again
Check the blog now as I have added a temporary link …
http://booksinarabic.blogspot.com
mm
December 14th, 2006 at 1:54 am
I think it has more to with the number of people who are interested and have the resources, than anything else. Lot of developing countries do not have their books in free libraries not just Arabs.
Don Lapre is a Superstar
webmaster@j-ams.org
www.j-ams.org
January 15th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
yeh thats a real shame for arabs (me included)
we have no excuse especially since there are numerous arabic speaking countries
and a huge cultural heritage.
the problem have 2 sides ,the gov cultural ministries spend money on modern culture and discard old litteraturs there are even old endangered parchement and books that are in some old rural towns waiting to be swept by the next flown or destroyed by the next earthquake and no one cares to preserve them let digitalize
national patrimony .
why you ask?
well because the officials are Illiterate at worse or non-cultured or maybe just corrupt and greedy.
the other side is the resspensibility of the civic society (if ever it exists in the arabe world) witch plagued by tyranny have been in a defeatist state with no Initiative spirit at all (maybe there is still hope).
it’s just a simplistic overview that don’t reflect the complex reality but that’s why there is little arabic contribution (at least compared to number of arabic speaking people in the world)