Most Afghans Can’t Read, but Their Book Trade Is Booming - nytimes

KABUL, Afghanistan — Nuts come in from Iran and fresh fruit from Pakistan, even though Afghanistan grows both in abundance. Years of bloated foreign aid budgets have produced high salaries, destroying local industries. As a result, about the only thing the country does not import is opium.

And books.

At a time when book publishers in many countries are struggling, over the last three years those in Afghanistan have been flourishing — and that is despite the country’s chronically low literacy rates: Only two out of five Afghan adults can read. But those who can seem to be doing it with remarkable regularity, both in spite and because of the country’s cyclonic violence, especially recently.

In a turbulent, troubled society, curling up with a book has become the best tonic around.

“I think in any environment, but perhaps especially places at war, book reading creates a pause from day-to-day life and isolates a reader from their surroundings while they’re buried in a book,” said Jamshid Hashimi, who runs an online library and is a co-founder of the Book Club of Afghanistan. “This is powerful anywhere, but in a place like Afghanistan, it can be a means of emotional survival.”

Unsurprisingly, Afghanistan’s book publishers have capitalized on this. What is more noteworthy is that a major piece of Afghan socioeconomic development is happening without direct foreign aid or foreign advisers.

“It’s an Afghan-owned and Afghan-led process,” said Safiullah Nasiri, one of the four brothers who run Aksos, a book publisher that also operates several bookstores in Kabul. His remark was a deliberate play on international community jargon about shifting to Afghan control of institutions dominated by Westerners.

“It’s really an exciting time in the book world here,” Mr. Nasiri said. “Publishers are all trying to find new books to publish, young people are trying to find new books to read, writers are looking for publishers. It’s a very dynamic atmosphere. And it’s something independent, with no foreign assistance.”

Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan with a rapidly growing population of more than five million, now has 22 book publishers, many with their own presses, or using the presses at local printing houses. Scores of others are scattered throughout the country’s 34 provinces, even in war-torn areas like Helmand and Kandahar.

In the past year, especially, many publishers have been expanding, opening up distribution centers across the country and underwriting either their own bookstores or providing consignments to independent bookstores. Kabul has 60 registered bookstores, according to the government.

It was not always so. During the Taliban reign from 1996 to 2001, only two publishers survived: the state publisher and a private company, Aazem Publishing. By the end of 2001, the only independent bookstorewas in the Intercontinental Hotel, the site of a deadly attack last month.

In the years after the American-led invasion, cheaply printed and brazenly pirated books from Pakistan were as dominant as that country’s fruits and vegetables in the markets of Kabul.

Afghanistan’s new government faced the enormous task of rebuilding the educational system, which had been savaged by decades of civil war, followed by five years of a Taliban regime that closed schools and destroyed foreign-language books. That meant millions of new textbooks, which initially were printed in Pakistan. But as relations with that country soured, the government steered those textbook contracts to a few major Afghan publishers. - Read More

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