A modest two-story residential apartment building in the city of Saida houses a Lebanese publisher far more optimistic than others in the industry these days; that the company is also a software firm and owns no printing presses is indicative of the fundamental transformation underway. Sitting in his quiet office, surrounded by bound tomes published by some of Lebanon’s most prominent publishing houses, Nabih Barakat, a software engineer at Byblos Microsystems, which operates arabicebook.com (AEB), says that many of the paper volumes around him have already completed their digitalization into PDF files, after receiving the consent of respective publishing establishments. These books are now a part of the company’s growing database that currently holds 2,500 electronic books on offer, a process that began in 2001. “A large part of our work consists of producing [academic] software, and sales of electronic books make up less than 50 percent of our total
