Visitors observing a calligraphy artist at work at the book fair yesterday. PICTURES: Nasar T K.
By Ayman Adly /Staff Reporter
The 25th edition of Doha International Book Fair (DIBF) will be concluding Saturday having recorded an impressive turnout of visitors in the last few days.
“It is good that the fair has expanded to a much larger area this year," said Nour, an exhibitor of children and education books. He suggested that it would have been better if the stalls were distributed on the basis of category so it would give all exhibitors equal chance to be seen by potential customers.
"For example, there are children's and educational books and toys at the middle and both at the far ends of the venue," he explained.
Nizar, an exhibitor of interior design catalogue books and magazines, said his targeted customers are architects and those working in decoration in addition to the amateurs from the field.
One of his customers said such category of books if available at local bookstores are much expensive. Nizar, like a considerable number of other exhibitors, tried to improve his sales by giving special offers on his books that amounted to more than 50% of the tag price.
While the rare antiquity books and manuscripts where on display at the exhibition for a tag price of hundreds of thousands of Riyals, there were also some other stalls that displayed copies of popular Arabic newspapers and magazines, mostly Egyptian, from the early 1910s and onwards for tens or hundreds of Riyals. Both such categories were of particular interest to Qataris rather than expatriates.
“Young Qataris were very keen to own a great number of my rare collection of antiquity books and they showed immense interest in the books that were printed centuries ago with their exquisite paintings. I almost sold out 95% of my collection, which encourages me to come back again to Doha next year with a new collection of rarities,” said Badr al-Hajj, owner of Folios limited, who displays limited edition of books that were printed more than 400-500 years ago.
He said that some of these were sold for as much as $140,000, and consider that value of a book as a good and guaranteed asset better than money in the bank.
DIBF also featured a number of sophisticated software educational programmes, mostly in Arabic. The majority of visitors have been Arab expatriates and locals, as the vast majority of books on display were in Arabic with some in English and some other languages. A considerable number of exhibitors expressed their admiration of the smooth co-ordination at the fair and stressed that locals were very keen to buy books, especially women, some of whom even bought a large number.
