Compass – About six months before it was held, Jaber Abu Faris, president of the Jordanian Publishers Association, announced that the twenty-first session of the “Amman International Book Fair” is threatened with cancellation due to the failure to find a suitable place to hold it, after the expiry of the lease contract for a land located on the airport road. concluded in 2016.

Although the administrative body of the “Union” learned of the expiration of the aforementioned contract during the previous session last September, it did not disclose this until the beginning of this month, in a move that may be interpreted as an attempt to pressure the official institution as the start of the next session approaches, But it raises many questions about the management of one of the most prominent cultural events in the country.

The Union, as usual, is busy with patchwork solutions to accumulated problems, as it addressed the concerned authorities, represented by the Ministry of Culture and the Greater Amman Municipality, in order to allocate an alternative place whose area will certainly be small and not commensurate with the number of participating publishing houses, which exceeded three hundred and sixty in the past years, and that its rent will be determined With a known period, it also quickly expires.

Abu Fares’s statements went unnoticed despite being reported by many local and Arab media outlets, without the official authorities moving a finger. Rather, it seemed that the matter was all up to an expected meeting with the Minister of Culture, the date of which has not been set yet. A meeting that discusses the possibility of organizing the exhibition if that “promised” land is granted this year, and it avoids a fundamental imbalance related to the continuation of an exhibition supervised and managed by the “Union of Publishers” (which is a civil cultural association), when it must be transformed into an independent institution affiliated with a ministry or government authority, on the Like most Arab exhibitions.

An institutionalization that has remained elusive in a country where cultural affairs are managed during passing seasons, with taxpayers’ money spent on it without allowing them to participate in decision-making or review decisions affecting their daily lives and the system of their basic rights. Knowledge to contribute to the development of society and the state, or is it just a passing celebration to take the memorial photo of the officials…

The current data recall the conditions of the exhibition prior to 2016, when disputes within the Publishers Union, or due to its modest support, prevented it from holding in more than a year. The picture has not changed much until today, with the lack of coordination between the responsible parties, and the continuation of providing superficial approaches that do not rise to dealing with a demonstration that is supposed to present a civilized image of Jordan as a state and society.

And how is the exhibition’s sustainability achieved as long as it requires urgent aid each year to be granted piecemeal to the “Jordanian Publishers Association”, which suffers from a tight budget and the absence of a database or studies on the reality of the book industry, reading trends and patterns, and dependence on traditional mechanisms in printing, publishing and distribution, due to The lack of professionalism in many publishing houses, in addition to the problems of censorship and high operational costs.

The Jordanian publishing sector did not benefit from the boom experienced by the book market in recent years with the emergence of a number of houses that attracted Arab writers, and their presence increased in quantity and quality in Arab book fairs after the decline of their Lebanese counterpart, and the adoption of academic books published in Jordan by Arab universities and institutions, It was no more than a single success for some publishers.

With the spread of the Corona pandemic, the losses of the sector in which only fifty publishing houses out of the more than one hundred and fifty that Amman embraced have survived, as a result of its inability to develop its industry on the one hand, and the tendency of cultural institutions in the Arab countries, in particular, to austerity in their budgets, which were Part of it goes to the acquisition of Jordanian and Arabic books.

There is no need to invent the wheel again, and the Jordanian state should organize the Amman Exhibition itself after establishing a permanent headquarters for it within a specialized institution that has a fixed annual budget, and adopting a strategy that makes the book part of development plans in various sectors, instead of ignoring culture completely in all ministerial statements that It was presented by successive Jordanian governments over the past century.

The New Arab