Manal and Alaa's bit bucket

Went to my favorite annual event today The Cairo Book Fair, where you get to ogle at books too expensive for you to buy, eat some of the worst food in town and then slum with the masses while buying used books at SourAlAzbakeya (the wall of Azbakeya: Cairo's ancient but still kicking used books market, one of the main sources of culture for the poor, the not so poor and basically anyone who isn't rich).

but every year we manage to find some decent books, the standard fair of paperbacks and comics, a couple of cheap Indian edition computer books that aren't way outdated and the occasional gem.

This year we found a real gem.

The Kuwait National Culture and Art Council has a monthly series called Alam Al Ma'refa (world of knowledge), the series is very popular, it publishes books on all sorts of topics (science, history, philosophy, politics, etc), covers translations from all over the world and Arabic works from all over the Arab speaking world and introduced some very important books to the Arab Reader.

This series is actually subsidized so it sells very cheaply, and the subscription cost is ridiculously low (25$ for individuals in Arab countries).

but with 307 titles and new books coming every month it becomes a bit difficult to track all the titles, keep them in one place, search through them for that piece of information you need right now, share them with friends etc.

each year in The Fair Kuwait has a small section where they sell all the issues of the series, each year I buy a bunch and plan to complete the collection one day, but this year we where in for a treat.

they now sell a CD with issues 1-267 of the Alam Al Ma'refa series in standard pdf format and all that for just 70LE (slightly less than 12$).

turned out the PDFs had the CopyText feature disallowed, but using the pdftk tool I managed to remove this stupid restriction ''(hey I need plain text to grep through, I need to quote the stuff without having to retype it and I get to choose the format of my books and why does XPDF respect these stupid DRM bits anyway?)''

for convenience sake I put the unprotected PDFs on a torrent, enjoy them.

but think about it; 25$ a year for 12 high quality books at your doorstep is nothing and 70LE for 267 high quality ebooks is more than nothing so please consider buying these.

want to know more about the series? here is an index with all the titles

want to know even more about the series, or can't read arabic Whirlpool is maintaining a list of the translated books in the series, some with interesting wikipedia links (someone should work on amazon links)