Hassan Benmehdi, writing from Casablanca for the online Magharebia, has a gloomy feeling about the state of bookshops. It is not really clear to me that this situation applies to all of Morocco, but the article makes interesting reading.
In Morocco, bookshops used to be desirable locations as intellectuals, students and avid readers would spend hours rooting through well-stocked shelves searching for a new publication or a masterpiece which had impacted the world of literature or universal thought.
Today, the sector seems to have been plunged into an endemic crisis. Despite the organisation of shows and fairs in several towns across the country, the market is still struggling to organise itself and make its presence felt. Apart from a few bestsellers or didactic works, sales are becoming more seasonal and only reach prosperous levels at the start of each school year.
However, most people still see bookshops as appropriate means of accessing information, ideas and fictional works. In the face of a reading crisis, publishers have reacted by increasing the number of titles, shortening print runs, reducing display times for books on the shelves, and increasing prices.
"We're producing more and more books, but for fewer and fewer readers," Seddik Z, an expert on the subject, said.
Read the full story here: Moroccan Bookshops
Tags: Morocco Fes, Maghreb news
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