Anyone know about this little corner of the publishing world?
Does, for example, iOS and OSX support (or is it iTunes?) e-books in Arabic? More specifically, can one sell Arabic e-books through Apple?
Similarly, does Kindle (I think not but want to check)?
Little idea floating around and just need to get a bit more information.
Why not? Also Chinese, and I expect Klingon as well.
E.g. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/alwaraq-alwraq-arabic-books/id556429220?mt=8
It’s a travel guide to Europe?
Judging from my experience browsing bookshops in Kuwait and the UAE, unless you’re going to publish a dozen titles consisting mainly of pictures called something like “Sheikh Marktoum: a Man Ahead of Our Times” or you’ve somehow acquired the rights to Mein Kampf, then you might be wasting your time.
I think the Koran has been published already.
As Pat Condell points out–the number of worthwhile books written in Arabic each year could fit into your briefcase with plenty of room left over for your lunch.
How about translating the new atheists into Arabic. Fatwas all around might provide a few laughs.
Presumably you’re going to publish a guide to which EU countries are best for immigrants, and how to get there? There’ll be one big chapter on Germany, and 27 other chapters with the words “don’t bother”.
Tim Newman – “Judging from my experience browsing bookshops in Kuwait and the UAE”
Well he was doing spy thrillers so maybe he plans on doing an Arabic James Bond? Well, it will never work without more goat porn. Which might be a little hard to work into the plot of your standard spy thriller.
The trivial answer is yes, because Kindle etc. can display images and you can render Arabic text as images. I looked at a Kindle book on Amazon, a book of stories in English and Arabic. The English text seemed to be normal text, while the Arabic text seemed to be images.
The more interesting questions of whether Kindle supports Arabic fonts and right-to-left text remain. I’ve just read a Kindle book in which some Tibetan characters weren’t displayed correctly by my Kindle, but the book was very badly produced and this might have been the fault of the book, not the Kindle.
I’ll try making an Arabic e-book and let you know how it goes.
I know that Cyrllic is supported very badly in some ebooks but whether is my kobo or the book is another matter.
Kindle does, I expect the others do too. ebooks are basically html
I seem to remember Mark Steyn saying that more books were translated into Spanish in one year than have been translated into Arabic in the last 1000 years.
http://www.steynonline.com/5749/the-blasphemy-police
Christ! He’s going to indoctrinate ISIL with “ragging on Richie! Not sure if there’s not something in the Geneva Convention covers this, Section on chemical & biological weapons.
I tried it and it seemed to work on a Kindle Touch. It’s true that e-books are basically HTML, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that e-book readers have built in Arabic fonts, or support fonts embedded in the book, and support right-to-left text. My Kindle Touch seems to contain an Arabic font and support right-to-left text. It’s still possible that other e-book readers might not.
According to Google the answer is no. Happy to be proved wrong.
Ha! That was quick. Google thinks kindle doesn’t but obviously there are other readers. From what I remember of Arabic, word wrapping is a problem so there’s more to it than just right to left.
This FAQ from my e-reader/converter would seem to suggest it can handle non-English characters:
http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/faq.html#how-do-i-convert-my-file-containing-non-english-characters-or-smart-quotes
So I’d imagine it does.
Are physical e-book devices much of a market, now? I can read e-books on my small format tablet, I gather. I’d probably stick with my Kindle because of the power use issue, but a lot of people will be prefering a single device.
And tablets certainly handle Arabic.
Thinking of having a learn to swim primer translated?