FYI ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom... I was standing next to the entrepreneur Ala’ Alsallal, 28, as he showed me piles of the banned books that his company, Jamalon, ships to readers throughout the Middle East. Jamalon is a four-year-old online books retailer that carries 10 million titles, 75% of them in Arabic. Among them are the books on Alsallal’s new banned books list, which Alsallal started because he says it helps sales to ID the books being targeted by the government censors in the 20 countries where the company operates. “We keep facing trouble because of what we do,” he says. “But I feel happy when I get people to read or get books.” Delivering books is Alsallal’s passion, though he also aspires to grow a company the size of Microsoft. There is a Jorge Luis Borges quote hanging outside his door: ‘I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library,’ in offices that house 20 programmers, customer service representatives. Just around the corner are books which have arrived from dealers elsewhere in the Middle East and in Europe. Alsallal laughs off the government censors. Among the banned books on his 10 million-strong list of available titles: Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code (banned in Israel), and Hadith al-Junud (“Soldiers’ sayings”), a historical novel about the 1986 Yarouk University protests in Jordan (banned in Jordan). And, 50 Shades of Grey (banned everywhere from the United Arab Emirates to some places in the United States).
Posted on: Tue, 01 Jul 2014 19:45:00 +0000
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