Can Tarek Mitri Save the Lebanese Book Industry?

Culture Minister Tarek Mitry has some good ideas and some bad ones on the state of reading in Lebanon and how to fix it.

Yesterday, Mr. Mitry announced in the seminar of “Consultations for Drafting a Policy for Books and Reading in Lebanon” what he thinks was the problem with the Lebanese book industry: the “rise of competition in Arab countries and weak support from the state.”

That sounds Alarmingly like the French notion of “cultural exceptionalism”, a strange belief that the taxpayer should pay money to encourage the production of movies nobody wants to watch and books nobody wants to read. The cultural industry, like all others, strives on competition and it would be silly to make imported books more expensive just so that we be patriotic and read mediocre wrote-in-Lebanon books.

If that is what Mr. Mitri is planning to do, then the seminar’s declared aims of restoring Beirut’s position as the “capital of Arabic books” and building “bridges between Arabic culture and the cultures of the world” sound hollow at best.

When I was a kid, I used to love reading Rajol Al Mustaheel (The Man of the Impossible), a quality Egyptian mini-series about a James-bond-like character. I would have been really upset if my government had coaxed me into reading some cheap Lebanese copy-cat.

But not all Mr. Mitri’s ideas are bad; his proposals for enforcing copyright protection, introducing the ISBN standard and opening regional public libraries are all very ambitious and noteworthy (if followed through).

But Mr. Mitri, Please don’t spoil our writers, let them shape up or die. The Lebanese readers would be very thankful.