The digital world of literature: Momentum in the Arab world

The digital world of literature: Momentum in the Arab world

Reading is a ritual of sharing and emotion to younger generations thanks to YouTube, Spotify, Goodreads and book clubs on Facebook. In many cases, you do not write about a book, but often you hear about it. Hence, its success is difficult to measure by traditional standards.

Nada El-Shabrawy is the founder of the first Arabic-language YouTube channel dedicated to books in Egypt. Since 2017, Dodet Kotob (Bookworm) attracted 100,000 subscribers who follow her thoughts about books she reviews.

Aged 25, El-Shabrawy read 1,172 books (until January 2021) and broke the record she set for herself a few years earlier when she challenged herself to read 1,000 books before reaching 30.

A representative for the publishing houses of Gen Z and born with a mouse in her hand and her finger on a screen, El-Shabrawy is currently director of digital marketing at the Cairo bookstore Diwan and webmaster of the Kuwaiti platform for creative writing Takween.

Over the past few years the publishers started getting interested in BookTubers as platforms of opportunity and sales. They allow them to communicate with a large, otherwise hard-to-reach demographic group. The influence of BookTubers on the publishing world is growing. They are managed