Al Arabi Publishing and Distributing was founded on 1976 by Mr Ismael Abd El Hakam Bakr, who graduated from the Department of
Librarianship, Archives, and Information Science in the Faculty of Arts, Cairo University. His biggest dream was to establish an Arabic publishing house. After he gained experience in the publishing area during his work in Al Ahram (a newspaper and a prestigious publishing house), he went to Beirut in early seventies, In order to establish  and manage a publishing house called “Dar Al Fata Al Arabi” which is considered one of the first publishing houses in the field of children’s books. Upon his return to Egypt, after the break out of the Lebanese Civil War, he established Al Arabi Publishing and Distributing, which has become one of the most important Egyptian publishing houses.
Al Arabi started by publishing books in politics, history, mass communication, libraries, as well as some specialized books in arts, poetry, engineering, architecture and memoirs, etc.
Through those forty years, Al Arabi has published pioneering works written by great writers who have started their amazing careers with their first publications with Al Arabi, like Mostafa Tiba, Refaat El Saed, Dr. Mohammad Shaalan, Mohammad Ibrahim Abu Senna and Mahgoub Omar. We have also published the masterpieces of the famous artist Mohiey El Din Al labbad, specially his famous albums; “Nazar”. We have also published the first books written by Dr. Emad Abu Ghazy, Abd El Aziz Gamal El Din, Hasaanin Crom, Dr. Shabaan Hkalifa, Dr. Awatef Abd El Rahman, Dr. Laila Abd El Megid, Dr. Mahomed Khalil, Dr. Nelly Hanna and Dr Emad Helal, etc.
After he passed away, Mr Ismail’s son, Sherif Ismail Bakr, and his daughter, Ranya Ismail Bakr, both have continued their father’s legacy, but with adding some changes; Al Arabi has not limited itself with only political and non-fiction books, we have also started a new series and have named it “#Different_Books”.
We got books from countries like from South America, such as, Brazil, Colombia, Peru and Argentine. Also from other countries, such as The Czech Republic, Montenegro, Iceland, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Macedonia, China, Norway, UK, Belgium, Slovakia, Germany, Portugal, Italy, Finland and Turkey. This year we are translating books from Ireland, India, Hungary, France, Armenia, Serbia, Korea and Guatemala in addition to more books from countries we have translated from before, such as The Netherlands, Turkey, Macedonia, Argentine and Brazil.
Now we have more than 200 books from more than 55 ‘different’ countries from all over the world.
At the beginning people were not familiar with our line of work, which is translating fiction from all over the world. We tried and we are still trying to present our readers with fiction that is ‘different’ to what they are used to read, which is usually the bestselling books from The United States. So, we thought differently and chose another route. Which to be honest was a little bit difficult at the beginning. The difficulty was in trying to convince people to get out of their comfort zones and try something new, and to make those who do not like reading, read. We have solved this problem by using different aspects:
First, we designed our covers differently, like using flags on the spine, and choosing an interesting line from the book to put it on the front cover, we also used postage stamps on the back cover. Now, it is like a collection. Most or our readers buy our books because they look ‘different’ from what they are used to.
Second, we used social media to reach every one and to introduce our books. We did so by posting quotes from our books along their covers, which got people asking about these books and how to get them.
Another difficulty was in making our selves known to everyone, not only in Egypt, but all over the Arab world, which we have succeeded in overcoming. Not only by distributing our novels at the most famous bookshops in all the Arab Countries, but by promoting them on Social Media as well, like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and now we are trying Snapchat, hence everyone in the Arabic Gulf prefer using it.
Furthermore, our books are sold as paperbacks, and Ebooks. Now our books are on Google Books, SOUQ.com, EBSCO, and Abjad and on famous Arabic online stores, such as, Neelwfurat, Jareer, Jumia and Batana News.