51 : The Global eBook Market: Current Conditions & Future Projections Cloud service was launched in beta version in the rst half of 2012. Other online stores for books in Arabic include Mizado, one of the leading web stores in the Middle East, covering a wide range of products, including electronics, furniture, and home appliances, as well as books, for delivery to the customer’s home. The catalog of Arabic books is limited to about 250 titles. Aido is an online store, founded in 2008, specializing in various media and gifts, with a limited o ering in books, most of which are in English. DoBazar is a recently launched online store with a Bangladeshi background, specializing in gifts, but aiming to add books, including titles in Hindi, to their product list. The move from using the Internet for the distribution of physical goods to distributing digital material on mobile devices is confronting a number of challenges that are speci c to the Arab context. First of all, digitizing Arabic writing is a challenge, as representing Arabic typography properly on reading devices comes with substantial technical di culties—a problem of both practical and symbolic impact in a cultural context that esteems calligraphy as being a particularly important aspect in books. As a result, Arabic is currently not supported for ebooks on several of the internationally leading platforms, like the Apple iBookstore. This makes it not only di cult to produce and distrib- ute Arabic ebooks—It tends to discriminate books against all other media and content that are available to consumers on their mobile devices instantly, over popu- lar services such as the iTunes store. The most ambitious initiative aiming at digital con- tent is probably Rufoof. Founded in 2010, Rufoof is a Dubai-based ebook portal o ering publishers a com- plete line of services from digital conversion to distribu- tion. It currently serves as a distributor for 20 publishers and has service agreements with another 30, with 5,000 titles, mostly in Arabic, currently in its inventory. In a strategic move, Rufoof is preparing to build an overarch- this poor accounting. And yet, at least in some areas, notably in the Gulf but also in Saudi Arabia, the situation improves dramatically. For instance, in the United Arab Emirates, illiteracy has fallen from 75 percent only four decades ago to 7.5 percent today (Jen Thomas: “UAE cruises from illiterate to well-read in 40 years.” The National, August 27, 2012). Some 500,000 printed book titles are available in Arabic, with about 15,000 new titles and 10,000 re-edi- tions per year, according to estimates.3 These are modest numbers, compared to the 90,000 new titles and re-edi- tions in Germany alone, with a population of about 82 million. The foundations of the Arab book market are ever more strained, as small- and medium-sized publish- ing houses prevail, with strictly limited access to capital, as well as a high cost for a largely unreliable distribution system in most Arab countries, and a very serious impact from piracy on sales in most markets. Any successful new book is pirated, on paper or digitally, within days of its release. Among the well educated, Arabic books are furthermore in direct competition with content in the English language—books, but also all other media and formats—so that reading and learning in English (or in French for the Maghreb) has become a central feature. In 1999, Neel WaFurat,was established as the rst platform for purchasing Arabic books online. Based in Lebanon, it serves the domestic market as well as cus- tomers in neighboring countries, plus Egypt, the Gulf, and Saudi Arabia (which, with a population of 28 million, is the largest single Arab market). Recently, Neel WaFurat added a dedicated site for digital books, iKitab, distribut- ing some 3,000 Arabic language titles as ebooks in EPUB format Neel WaFurat also added a site for digital maga- zines, iMaghaleh, hosting about 100 magazines from all over the Arab world. These platforms are available for Apple’s iPad as well as for the Android platform. An iKitab 3 Data in this chapter are, if not indicated otherwise, taken from the study “Publishing in the United Arab Emirates” by Rüdiger Wischenbart and Nasser Jarrous, released in September 2012.