Sustainability in the field of publishing and writers

The Center, in cooperation with the Qatari Forum for Publishers and Distributors and the Read and Rise Initiative, organized a symposium entitled “Sustainability in the Field of Publishing and Books,” presented by the Omani novelist Ahmed Al-Alawi, where Dr. Saif Al-Hajri spoke, explaining that sustainability is important for all environmental natural resources, as humans are left behind on the earth, and demands By preserving the resources it contains, which are necessary for the continuation of his life, and for this reason the waste of resources must be reduced, whether in printing and publishing books or other things, and printing them in limited copies as needed.

Mohamed Hammam Fikry spoke about publishing and environmental sustainability, explaining that the book industry has an impact on the environment, because it leads to the cutting down of trees. Statistics indicate that there are more than 32 million trees annually that are cut down to turn them into books. One tree is enough to print 25 books. If, according to UNESCO estimates, what is published in the Arab world annually is about 2 million and 200 thousand books globally, which amounts to 4 million new titles every year after adding the production of the authors themselves and children’s books, which makes book production have a significant impact on the environment, and thus He believes that only what is worth publishing should be planned for the market need, printing books in limited copies and according to need, looking for alternatives to papers extracted from trees, using recycled papers, reducing the size of the book, using less bulky papers, and encouraging audio and electronic books.

Finally, Mr. Reyad Ahmed Saleh, Director of the Qatari Forum for Publishers and Distributors, spoke and explained the importance of the book as a transmitter of knowledge, and the importance of the forum as a platform that brings together publishers and distributors in the State of Qatar, and that the goal of the symposium is to come up with new ideas that help achieve sustainability in the field of book printing and publishing, and that recommendations The symposium will be taken seriously in order to formulate recommendations to the decision maker. In order to adopt it in order to achieve sustainability commensurate with the environmental resources in the State of Qatar.

Author

Aly