Most Afghans can’t read, but their book trade is booming

22 local publishers supply 60 shops in Kabul city

Nuts come in from Iran and fresh fruit from Pakistan, even though Afghanistan grows both in abundance. Years of bloated foreign aid budgets have produced high salaries, destroying local industries. As a result, about the only thing the country does not import is opium.
At a time when book publishers in many countries are struggling, over the last three years those in Afghanistan have been flourishing — and that is despite the country’s chronically low literacy rates: Only two out of five Afghan adults can read. But those who can seem to be doing it with remarkable regularity, both in spite and because of the country’s cyclonic violence, especially recently.
In a turbulent, troubled society, curling up with a book has become the best tonic around. “I think in any environment, but perhaps especially places at war, book reading creates a pause from day-to-day life and isolates a reader from their surroundings while they’re buried in a book,” said Jamshid Hashimi, who runs an online library and is a co-founder of the Book Club of Afghanistan. “This is powerful anywhere, but in a place like Afghanistan, it can be a means of emotional survival.”
Unsurprisingly, Afghanistan’s book publishers have capitalized on this. What is more noteworthy is that a major piece of Afghan socioeconomic development is happening without direct foreign aid or foreign advisers. “It’s an Afghan-owned and Afghan-led process,” said Safiullah Nasiri, one of the four brothers who run Aksos, a book publisher that also operates several bookstores in Kabul. His remark was a deliberate play on world community jargon about shifting to Afghan control of institutions dominated by Westerners.
“It’s really an exciting time in the book world here,” Nasiri said. “Publishers are all trying to find new books to publish, young people are trying to find new books to read, writers are looking for publishers. It’s a very dynamic atmosphere. And it’s something independent, with no foreign assistance.” Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan with a rapidly growing population of more than five million, now has 22 book publishers, many with their own presses, or using the presses at local printing houses.
Scores of others are scattered throughout the country’s 34 provinces, even in Helmand and Kandahar. In the past year, especially, many publishers have been expanding, opening up distribution centers around the country and underwriting either their own bookstores or providing consignments to independent bookstores. Kabul has 60 registered bookstores, according to the government.
Foreign aid underwrote the school system, so the textbook business jump-started the book publishing industry. Because millions of textbooks had to be printed in a short period of time, the companies invested in their own presses, which went largely idle once the school publishing season was over. Then the new publishers began translating Western books from English into Dari and Pashto, the country’s two main languages. Other publishers sprung up, renting the bigger companies’ presses.
“There was such a curiosity and thirst to know about the world and how people think about Afghanistan,” said Davood Moradian, director general of the Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies, a research organization whose picturesque ancient campus, the Fort of Nine Towers, is a favored venue for book parties. “The book industry is a growing phenomenon to try to satisfy that thirst.”
Aksos has even started a sort of Afghan version of Amazon, selling books through its Facebook page and then delivering them the same day by couriers for the equivalent of about 50 cents a book in Kabul. Afghans often lack internet connections or personal computers at home, but educated young people usually have Facebook on their smartphones. Piracy remains endemic. Government officials have started enforcing the country’s long-ignored copyright laws, according to Sayed Fazel Hossain Sancharaki, who is in charge of publishing at the Ministry of Information and Culture.
“In the last four months we’ve had four or five copyright cases,” he said. One photocopy shop was closed recently by the government for running off cheap copies of printed books. Aksos recently began commissioning original books, too, including “Baghdadi Pir,” a historical novel in Pashto about a British spy in the 1920s during the time of King Amanullah. But the publisher’s big sellers are self-help books, particularly in the how-to-get-rich genre.