kotobli is a book discovery platform dedicated to amplifying cultural and literary production from the Southwest Asia/North Africa (SWANA) region, with a special focus on independent publishers and marginalized writers. Curated with care according to geography, genre, and even theme, kotobli’s lists create opportunities for readers to encounter their next great read based on affinity and interest. I corresponded with the largely volunteer-run team behind kotobli on their conceptualisation of the website; in the process, I learned a lot about the difficulties underlying literary circulation in the Arab world, and the groundbreaking, creative ways in which small SWANA-based presses navigate them.
Alex Tan (AT): How did you begin to conceptualise kotobli? What distinguishes it from other book recommendation/discovery platforms like Goodreads, or even Bookstagram and Booktok accounts?
kotobli (k): A couple of years ago, we were getting frustrated with how difficult it is to look for good books about the Southwest Asia/North Africa (SWANA) region online. We found them to be badly categorised and difficult to sort through—and if we were looking for books in Arabic, they were almost impossible to find with only keywords and a topic in mind. Without knowing which titles to look for, we could hardly discover books worth reading.
On a brief visit to Lebanon in spring 2021, one of our founders, Omar, was determined to find Layla Baalbaki’s Ana Ahya, which he had discovered through an academic paper on feminism in Lebanon. After unsuccessful online searches and hopping from one bookstore to another, he finally found a used copy.
“It shouldn’t be this hard,” we thought. So we decided to make it easier. kotobli started as a platform to help readers find interesting books from the SWANA region, by topic, genre, geography, the identity of the authors, and through our curated reading lists. We named it kotobli—written in all lowercase letters as a nod to its Arabic origin “كتب لي”—which means “books for me”.
Throughout the process of collecting book information to populate our platform, we noticed deeply entrenched weaknesses in the publishing landscape of Arab countries: many publishers, especially smaller and older ones, do not have any digital presence; as such, many readers, especially in the Arab diaspora, are missing out on incredible books just because they would never show up in internet searches. This is where our project “Daleel el Nashirin” (Publishers’ Guide) started. With a grant from Culture Resource, we’ve been digitising the metadata for thousands of books and more than a dozen publishers in the Levant and North Africa. We’ve also been building virtual tools with publishers and authors participating in the process, giving them a free webpage on our website that they can fully control through a simple and safe content management system. Additionally, the publishers themselves have access to statistics that show how many readers look up their books on kotobli.
kotobli is different from other book recommendation platforms because it intentionally centres authors from the SWANA region, while highlighting women and queer literature. We are also distinguished by our book recommendation algorithm. Other platforms track similar users, so if you and X read two similar books, you will get a third book read by X as a recommendation. That tactic ignores your preferences and is oblivious to the kind of books that you and X have in common. On kotobli, the recommendation algorithm looks at genres and topics rather than similar readers. So if you look at history books about Lebanon and/or novels, you might get recommendations pertaining to historical fiction set in Lebanon. Lastly, we prioritise local and marginalised authors writing about their own communities. If you look up books about Palestine, the search results start with Palestinian authors, then Levantine authors, then Arab, and lastly westerners. This in itself is a challenge to the (paid-for and often unearned) popularity of (sometimes orientalist) books by the big five western publishers monopolising the book industry.
AT: Given what you’ve said about kotobli’s book recommendation algorithm, how do you envision readers navigating the platform? Do you hope to target particular kinds of readers?
k: So far, readers have been most attracted to our curated lists, which we sometimes put together ourselves or receive from authors, researchers, and book lovers who want to see a certain theme highlighted. Our lists come in different sizes and forms. Some lists are hyper-specific within a series: for example, a series on the Lebanese Civil War, which includes a list on women’s perspectives, specifically the Beirut Decentrists (coined by Miriam Cooke). Others have a broad theme but limited number of available books, like the list of Sudanese novels in English translation across time, curated by Sudanese-American writer Razan Idris. Some are broad in both number and scope, like the list of queer SWANA books.
We recently started experimenting with a “Discover” section on the homepage, which cycles through authors, publishers, literary magazines, and books from the region.
Ideally, readers would treat kotobli as a virtual library, where you can dive into rabbit holes and come across books you would’ve never known to look for. This is why we have what we call “exploration pages”, which are organised by topic, geography, and genre. The point is to be able to jump from one page to the next: from a book to a publisher, to another book, then the author, then their country, to the literary magazines they’ve published in and so forth. Or the opposite: start from a country whose literature you’re interested in reading more about (e.g., Syria) or a topic you’ve been wanting to take a deep dive into (e.g., magical realism in Arabic literature) to find out the different authors, translators, and books published within those parameters. You never know what gems you can stumble upon.
AT: The information listed with each book includes synopses and publication details; was it an intentional decision to exclude community reviews?
k: Yes, and no. Our team has been debating the usefulness of including community reviews; we don’t want to recreate the same platforms that already exist. Some of us love community reviews and look for them, while others prefer to arrive at a book unbiased by the opinion of others. For now, this conversation is on hold because we have limited capacities in terms of implementing new technological features (four of our six-member team are volunteers).
However, we’ve been discussing including both community and critics’ reviews that can be shown or hidden on the page. Ideally, we’d love the topics and lists on the website to have a life beyond the initial buzz of listicles as bite-sized forms of knowledge production—to instead generate meaningful conversations with a public audience that interact with authors and translators, and interrogate the impact of literature and nonfiction on their own lives. With that being said, we’ve partnered with several institutions towards that end, so stay tuned for some exciting announcements.
AT: I notice in the “Discover” section that there’s a mix of publishers, literary journals, and authors, including writers not from the SWANA region who have been translated into Arabic (such as Patrick Modiano). Did you have any considerations in mind when you chose what to spotlight?
k: It seems you’ve caught us in the early stages of experimenting with the “Discover” section. Right now, it highlights authors, publishers, and literary magazines from the SWANA region, specifically those who have signed up and updated their profiles on kotobli (which is free and open, by the way, contact us to claim your page).
Ideally, this section aims to highlight small authors and publishers who don’t receive as much attention in the book market, but whom we believe have brought valuable contributions to the literary scene.
AT: Could you give us a few examples of small publishers in the SWANA literary scene that you think people should know more about, and tell us a little about what contributions they’ve made?
k: Snoubar Bayrout is a Lebanese-based publisher and bookstore with an interesting catalogue: Samuel Beckett’s books in Lebanese dialect; a memoir of the 2006 July war on Lebanon, Beirut Lan Tabki [Beirut Won’t Cry] by Mazen Kerbaj; Zeinab Sharafeddine’s short story collection Dammeh about creatures that call people to the afterlife, written after the Beirut Blast in August 2020. Snoubar Bayrout’s books are just beautifully designed and the artwork is central to the books themselves. While they cut across genres and subjects, they feel rooted in Lebanese heritage and culture.
We also love Dar Onboz, a Lebanese-based children’s books publisher, for very similar reasons: their children’s books are as entertaining for children as for adults because the publishers have created an experience surrounding the books. Many of their books are performance-based or come with games and music that rely on a multi-sensorial, interactive experience. What’s the Color of the Sea? [Shou Lon El Baher?] by Nadine Touma, Dar Onboz’s co-founder, is a captivatingly hopeful and familiar read about a group of children who miss looking, smelling, and being near the sea, and decide to go look for it.
Dar Atlas, the long-standing Syrian-based publisher, has a wonderful diversity in their books as well: German and British literature translated into Arabic, non-fiction books on music and sports alongside contemporary Arabic poetry and non-fiction. For example, Samir Garees recently translated Sten Nadolny’s 1983 novel, The Discovery of Slowness, into Arabic. As readers interested in literature in translation, we appreciated this as a unique and welcome translation choice. As one final example, Boutros Al-Miarri’s The Damascene’s Visions: Fear’s Stories and His Art, very beautifully and evocatively pairs his poems and artwork together. The artwork is not secondary to the poems or vice versa; they are in service of each other and create a sensitive portrait of Damascus as the artist-writer remembers the city from Germany.
AT: What do you consider to be “literature”, given that the boundaries of that term can be so unstable? For instance, would premodern work be eligible to be featured on Kotobli? Are there particular genres or forms that would “disqualify” a book?
k: What goes into the database is more inclusive than what we choose to actively highlight; all “book forms” are admissible to the database (as long as they do not promote any kind of hatred such as Zionism, homophobia, or racism). This includes children’s literature, zines, literary journals, scholarly books, cookbooks, comics, self-help books—everything ranging from middlebrow to highbrow forms of literary production, independently published or not. We’re really interested in expanding the definitions of literature, and our restrictions aren’t based on specific genre categorisations. This is a really long-winded way to say: books from particular genres, forms, or time periods are absolutely not “disqualified”, but we do try to feature books that defy concrete categories of genre or form (e.g., autofiction or creative nonfiction that have both an essayistic and poetic voice) in more than one way on the website.
We’re also interested in the full cultural experience books can bring through experimental and multimedia formats. Dar Onboz, for example, has some playful books that are best experienced in song form, or are performance-based. They requested that we add an audio option to the website so they can upload music samples alongside the book descriptions (which we hope we’ll get to in the future).
AT: In your experience, are there any differences between the way that books are circulated and marketed in the Anglophone and Arabophone worlds?
k: Book fairs are big in the Arab world, much, much more than in Anglophone markets. Book fairs, which happen around once a year over a few days per country, are important lifelines for publishers’ revenues and their marketing and launching of new books to large audiences, even at discounted prices. They are also mesmerising for bibliophiles who suffer from the lack of proper distribution circuits across the Arab world, which makes shipping costs prohibitive when bibliophiles want to buy books from Arabic publishers not based in their country. Because of the difficulties in purchasing books directly, whether in person or online, many have turned towards subscription-based book platforms, a trend that we don’t think is as popular or profitable in the Anglophone world. However, there are very valid question marks around the over-reliance on both of these models, which again further marginalise small, independent presses in the Arab world who cannot place all their resources into one method of circulation over another, but many have been finding creative ways to navigate these systems.
AT: What are some of these creative ways that smaller independent presses have used to navigate difficulties in circulation and information sharing?
k: Many have been finding the cooperation between small independent presses and cultural institutions useful: book events are launched in library spaces or online platforms; joint collaborations happen between institutions on a particular theme. Shipping costs are the major barrier to most presses, so sending copies with traveling friends and acquaintances to be displayed in bookstores around the world is more common than you think.
AT: I love the lists you’ve curated! What areas, themes, or regions do you hope to expand into in the near future?
k: So many! We haven’t covered the Maghreb and the Gulf as much as we’d like, so these are definitely regions we are interested in expanding into in terms of recommendations and databases. There’s also a strong interest in curating lists around non-Arab SWANA literature, mostly recommendations on Turkish and Iranian literature that move beyond the most popular titles in translation.
Going back again to the concept of public knowledge, a few people have asked us for recommendations regarding cultural and social histories in the Arab world, and books that make knowledge on Arab art, music, film, dance, photography (and others) more accessible to people.
Within non-fiction, theory-driven texts on feminism, anticolonial movements, anticapitalism, and environmental readings are all subjects we’ve tried to address in our recommendations and have heard that people specifically want us to delve deeper into. Within literary fiction, one of our members is currently curating a list of horror books, which we think is cool. We also want to look into fantasy, sci-fi, and speculative fiction in more detail, as they also haven’t received the attention they deserve on the website.
AT: A more personal question: are there books from the SWANA region that are not receiving as much attention among Anglophone readers as they deserve? What would you recommend to someone who’s approaching Arabic (or SWANA) literature for the first time?
k: Tough question! Many of the books we’ve been reading or have read recently haven’t been translated into English yet, so Anglophone readers might not be aware of them—we’re thinking of the late Bassam Hajjar and Sargon Boulus’s poetry, Alaa Khaled’s memoirs, and Haytham Al-Wardany’s recent release too (which we picked up based on the author Hilal Chouman’s recommendation to Arablit).
But, to choose from what is available in English, we would recommend Ranya Abdelrahman’s translation of Samira Azzam’s collection of short stories entitled Out of Time, and Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail (trans. by Elizabeth Jacquette). Adania Shibli also wrote the introduction to Azzam’s short story collection, so this is a good reading pair. Also, Iman Mersal’s Traces of Enayat (trans. by Robin Moger). These are all recently translated releases from Palestine, Egypt, and Syria. There’s obviously much more we’re missing, but that’s a good start.
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Alex Tan is Senior Assistant Editor at Asymptote.
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Read more on the Asymptote blog:
- Internal and External Dialogues: PEN Grantee Isabella Corletto on Coming to Translation Through Publishing
- Free Fleas: Self-Publishing and Storytelling in Japan
- Au Diable Vauvert: The French Publishing House Championing Translation
Alex Tan is Senior Assistant Editor at Asymptote.