In the narrow alleyways of downtown Cairo, a red pickup truck stands before a nondescript store, its bed loaded with reams upon reams of paper. A group of men hauls them inside, one after another, placing them neatly to form towering stacks. Under a raised metal shutter, a young man named Abdelrahman sits behind a wooden desk as he flips through a handwritten inventory ledger.
Before the business belonged to Abdelrahman, it was his father’s, and before that, his father’s father’s. Opened at the turn of the 1950s, it expanded as Abdelrahman’s grandfather purchased sales quotas from other merchants during Egypt’s socialist years under Gamal Abdel Nasser. In many ways, the business stands today as it did then, at the heart of Cairo’s paper market, or “souk al-waraq,” and as a supplier for the presses that print Egypt’s books and newspapers.
When the currency crisis reached the doorstep of Egypt’s paper industry in 2022, the devaluation of the Egyptian pound ushered in a new reality for businesses already operating on razor-thin margins. “Reliance on imports, low profit margins and high prices,” Abdelrahman told me, are among the most pressing challenges in the paper industry. “Five percent profit margins are considered high.”
In the years since Egypt’s heavy foreign debt, overvalued currency, and disproportionate state and military control of the economy boiled over into the 2022 crisis, industries nationwide have struggled to keep up with inflation and hesitancy among foreign investors. As of September 2026, the Egyptian pound had lost about 70% of its value against the dollar since early 2022, according to the Central Bank of Egypt.
For paper suppliers like Abdelrahman, who sells finished paper products primarily from China and Indonesia, regional shipping disruptions have caused the cost of imported goods to rise unabated; Houthi attacks in the Bab al-Mandab Strait forced many shipping companies to suspend transit through the Suez Canal in late 2023, and the disruption of oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz during the U.S.-Israel war on Iran has further raised importing costs. While the Bab al-Mandab Strait has remained open amid Houthi advances in September 2026, shipping traffic has declined.
The fallout of these crises has been distributed unevenly across the paper industry. The largest domestic paper manufacturers, Qena Paper Industry and Misr Edfu, are owned primarily by Egyptian public-sector bodies and benefit from tax breaks and customs exemptions that allow them to set lower prices than those who import finished paper. The wood pulp used in their operations is sourced largely from the U.S., Brazil and Finland, according to U.N. Comtrade data, rendering these manufacturers less exposed to shipping disruptions in the Red Sea and Strait of Hormuz. According to the chairperson of Misr Edfu, these manufacturers are only able to meet around 45% of domestic demand, leaving much of the market dependent on imported paper.
The pressures facing Abdelrahman’s modest storefront have moved down the supply chain. Some printing presses, he noted, currently run at 10% of their full capacity. For publishers, the cost of raw materials is weighing on publishing decisions and the size of print runs, or the total number of printed copies of a book edition. And for some of Egypt’s small, independent publishing houses, long considered the linchpin of the country’s literary culture, these rising costs have proven insurmountable.
Unlike the state-owned manufacturers that dominate Egypt’s domestic paper production, the private sector forms the nucleus of the country’s publishing industry. In 2020, the Egyptian state-affiliated newspaper Al Ahram reported that private sector publishers were behind over 90% of the books entering Egypt’s domestic market, with the broader industry — including both independent and state-run houses — comprising 1,500 publishers and 500 publishing houses. According to the Arab Publishers’ Association, Egypt also eclipsed the rest of the Arab world in the number of published titles between 2022 and 2023; Saudi Arabia, in second place, reached just over half of Egypt’s output.
Diwan, which opened its first bookstore in 2002, was thrust into the uncertainties of the currency crisis an inopportune four months after the 2021 launch of its publishing house. In its infancy, the publishing house was forced to endure the growing cost of nearly every aspect of book production, from paper sourcing to storage. “A decision to print a book is now a considerably larger financial commitment than it was when we started,” said Ahmed Al-Qarmalawi, Diwan Publishing’s co-founder and CEO.
As production costs balloon, adjusting the size of print runs is often the first line of defense for mitigating losses, but it places publishers in a nearly impossible bind. Large print runs increase the cost of producing a single title while reducing the unit price of each copy. Alternatively, smaller print runs cost publishers less but incur a higher per-copy expense. If a title with few printed copies sells well, reproducing it later is often costly.
Khaled Lotfy, who founded both Tanmia Bookstore and Tanmia Publishing House and now serves as the bookstore’s director, built a formidable reputation by selling books from small publishers across Egypt and the Arab world. But where Lotfy once ordered between 2,000 and 4,000 copies of certain titles, he now orders 200 or 300 at most.
These cuts are influenced by production costs, Lotfy said, and by the availability of leisure time and how people choose to spend it. “That the currency has depreciated by half or more has greatly affected people’s purchasing behavior and the money they save for buying books,” he added. Consequently, many publishers and retailers are hesitant to pass rising costs on to the consumer, leaving them to absorb shrinking profit margins.
The Cairo International Book Fair stands as a symbol of Egypt’s literary prowess, with an almost cultlike following across the Arab world. The fair was founded in 1969 by the General Egyptian Book Organization, part of Nasser’s initiatives to nationalize cultural life.
“The book fair became very important,” novelist Montasser Al-Qaffash noted of the years following its inception, “in my opinion, to an insane degree.” And insanely important it has remained. In 2026, the two-week book fair saw a record 6.2 million attendees and featured over 1,450 publishing houses from 83 countries.
With a touch of sarcasm, Al-Qaffash said that publishers tell people, “I’m working now because I want to make it in time for the book fair” — but “now” means year-round, in perpetuity. While the book fair is critical to publishers across the board, it is especially so for small, independent publishers who, often without a brick-and-mortar storefront, rely on the event for its ready access to a large audience. For these two weeks, sales are abundant, and by selling directly to readers, publishers can bypass retailers to protect their bottom line.
Yet the seasonality of the book fair uniquely exposes those who rely on it to the rising cost of book production and volatility of the Egyptian pound. “Publishers traditionally prepare a significant portion of the year’s new releases for the fair,” Al-Qarmalawi said. “When paper prices or other production costs are rising, committing to those quantities months in advance can be risky,” he added. “You are effectively making a substantial financial decision based on costs that may look very different by the time the books reach the market.”
For small publishing houses, which have less liquidity than their larger counterparts and already struggle to afford increasingly pricey raw materials, these decisions carry outsize weight in the annual efforts to scale up for the fair.
When Lotfy opened Tanmia Bookstore in 2011, he had a vision of a kind of “permanent book fair,” he told me. He wanted to create a place where “you don’t need to wait from year to year to buy books from Arab publishers that are not [otherwise] available.” In recent years, Lotfy said he has witnessed even the most esteemed and long-standing publishers shut their doors.
Indeed, it was small publishing houses, now most exposed to rising costs, that first emerged in the margins to create the literary culture which, despite challenges, lives on today.
After consolidating power in 1954, Nasser moved to bring cultural life under state control. Four years later, the publishing industry began to splinter into state and independent sectors as Nasser founded the Ministry of Culture and began nationalizing the press, the film industry and many publishing houses. State-run publishing houses were plagued by bureaucracy and formal procedures, Al-Qaffash said, and “no officials possessed the ability to innovate or infuse new ideas.” Independent publishing houses initially took a hit from Nasser’s nationalization initiatives, but they gradually grew, alongside a reader base interested in literary forms neglected by the uncreative state-run presses.
“The 1990s represented a watershed moment with the founding of Dar Sharqiyat,” Al-Qaffash told me. Dar Sharqiyat, and later Dar Merit, led a new wave of small publishers revolutionizing books’ visual identity. They cared about how their books looked and felt, and the experience of encountering them, Al-Qaffash added. While state publishers were known for cutting costs at the printing press, these publishers focused on high production quality, with visually striking covers inscribed with Arabic calligraphy and drawings. As Al-Qaffash sees it, Dar Sharqiyat and Dar Merit “opened the door for the independent publishers that came later.”
But even these pioneering publishers haven’t been able to weather the changing literary and economic landscape, Lotfy said. Dar Sharqiyat closed in 2017. Dar Merit, he said, “hasn’t published anything significant in recent years and is considered practically nonexistent.”
It is changing, Al-Qarmalawi told me, but “I would not describe the [publishing] industry as being in decline.” A 2016 survey by the United Nations Development Programme and the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation found that respondents in Egypt read, on average, about 64 hours per year, more than in any other Arab country. Ten years after the survey was conducted, Egyptians still want to read.
Literary forms with limited commercial appeal, Al-Qarmalawi stressed, are most susceptible to being cut at the printing press. “What is at stake is not simply the number of titles being published,” he said. “It is the diversity of ideas, voices and intellectual experiences that readers can encounter.” For Lotfy, this has meant offering fewer books that are “dense, philosophical or serious.” Yet many books that carry few financial incentives have gone on to shape Egypt’s political, social and literary life. And it is small publishing houses, willing to take on these books, that now stand to lose the most.
Publishers still stand to profit from a younger demographic of readers, Al-Qarmalawi said, but they are competing with short-form online content for attention. Around 60% of Egypt’s population is under the age of 30, and tapping into this group’s changing relationship to reading is critical for publishers to appeal to a younger audience.
Rana, an avid reader in her early 20s, said that the book fair provides an opportunity to discover new titles, but during the rest of the year, her reading list is based on the recommendations of friends and social media creators. “I try to keep my mind open,” she said, “but I’m mostly a literature girl.”
For Al-Qarmalawi, Diwan’s visual identity is critical to appeal to a diverse reader base that often discovers titles through online content before encountering the book itself. Today’s readers gravitate toward crime, romance and horror, Lotfy said, and many publishers now choose titles from those genres to secure sales. Others are focusing on e-book publication to reduce the ever-growing cost of production and distribution. Al-Qarmalawi, for one, remains skeptical that e-books could gain the cultural relevance that physical books hold.
Egypt’s literary culture has indeed been reinvented before, with its nationalization, with the rise of small publishing houses, and with the innovation of the 1990s. These shifts emerged in response to the cultural, political and economic pressures of their time, just as Egypt’s writers and publishers are now recalibrating for the uncertainties ahead.
For Abdelrahman, the printing press offers something online content never will. He reached behind his shoulder to hold up a newspaper. “Physical books and newspapers are trusted because the printed word is vetted and attributed,” he said, with a nostalgia for a time that preceded him.
And this trust in the printed word has also conferred a kind of permanence upon the industries involved in its publication, printing and distribution. “I don’t see myself leaving the business,” Abdelrahman said, his eyes fixed on the emptied red truck as it set off through the narrow alleys of the paper market.