On Abjjad’s Free Ebooks for Gaza
By Olivia Snaije
In May, Gaza author and translator Anas Samhan tweeted a request, asking whether anyone knew people who worked at Abjjad, the Jordanian e-book app. People in Gaza need books to read, he wrote, and access was difficult. Samhan’s tweet went viral, retweeted by publishers around world, perhaps most passionately by Kuwaiti novelist Bothayna Al-Essa, co-founder of Takween, a publishing house, bookshop, and cultural platform.
Emad Hylooz, founder of the dynamic Abjjad platform which works with 160 Arab publishers, providing eBooks for them, responded to Samhan within 48 hours. “Our tech team worked on a complicated issue to create a promo code, “GazaRead”, only for people located in Gaza, which allowed them free access,” Hylooz said, adding that users need internet access only briefly to download the Abjjad app, followed by a book, which can then be read offline. Valid for three months, the #GazaRead promotional code gives people in Gaza access to 25,000 books. So far, 3000 people have been able to use the promotional code, she said.
“We would like to reach more people, but because they don’t have access to internet or social media, they don’t know about us.”
Hylooz is a computer scientist with a master’s degree in business administration who also happens to be an avid reader and book lover. Although she lives in Jordan, her family is originally from Qalqilya in the occupied West Bank. Hylooz says that even before Israel’s most recent assault on Gaza, readers in Gaza would reach out to Abjjad saying they wanted to subscribe but, because of difficulties with bank transactions, they weren’t able to. “Customer care would give them an individual promo code until the banking problems were sorted out,” Hylooz said.
Abjjad also has a number of Palestinians on staff. The company’s customer care leader, Lina Aldahi, was based in Gaza until last February, when she was able to leave for Cairo, as was one of Abjjad’s graphic designers.
Al Jazeera recently filmed Hylooz and her team for a feature about the #GazaRead initiative and contacted Anas Samhan in a video call. Publishers with their books on Abjjad “are all very emotional about what is happening in Gaza, and they all stood behind us. They told us that we allowed them to feel like they were finally doing something useful,” Hylooz said.
Of Abjjad’s 3.5 million registered readers, Palestinians are among the top ten users, downloading for the most part Palestinian literature, then Arabic-language literature and translated literature, while other countries such as Saudi Arabia favor philosophy, self-help, and psychology.
Since October 7, Hylooz says she has seen an increase in interest from all countries in the Arab region, as well as from Arabic-language readers around the world, in books about Palestine or Palestinian literature. Even before he won the 2024 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, Bassem Khandaqji’s A Mask, the Colour of Sky (Dar al Adab) written by a Palestinian poet and novelist held in an Israeli prison for the past 20 years, was one of the most read novels on the site, according to Hylooz. Abjjad has compiled two reading lists, one with suggestions for Palestinian literature, and another about Palestine, she says.
Abjjad’s message to Palestinians in Gaza about the promotional code read, in part: “Books have always been a comfort and a weapon, peace and consolation. In solidarity with our loved ones in the dear land of olives, and in response to the request of our dear sisters and brothers… Perhaps you will find something to love on our library shelves.”
Olivia Snaije is a journalist and editor based in Paris.