Pirated-books a thriving business in Morocco
rabat — With a backpack filled with pirated books, Khalid wanders the streets of Rabat peddling cheap reads — part of a flourishing black market eliciting howls of protest from bookshop owners.
“It’s true that it’s not legal, but the price of these books attracts readers,” said Khalid, 25, who hawks his wares at cafes in the Moroccan capital.
A little more than a year ago, he sold pirated DVDs, but Khalid said that market was hit when it became possible to watch films on a smartphone.
One of a large number of young Moroccans working informally in a country with high youth unemployment, he quickly found bookselling the only way to make a living.
Along the main streets of Rabat’s historical centre, dozens of other street vendors sell books in Arabic, English and French.
Pirated works can cost a tenth of the original price, with the average book going for just 20 dirhams ($2.10).
They include titles by Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho, as well as French works by Moroccan-born writer Tahar Ben Jelloun and Yasmina Khadra from Algeria.
Despite being prohibited, the market in pirated books is largely tolerated in cities across the kingdom.
But Abdelkader Retnani, president of the Moroccan Association of Book Professionals, said the trade has led to “significant losses for publishing and distribution professionals”. He blamed the illegal
book business on “an organised mafia which makes considerable profits”.
“The authorities recently seized 120,000 pirated books, this sum is enormous but it’s still early to estimate the losses” to booksellers, he added. Mohamed, who works in a small bookshop in Rabat, said the
street trade “directly impacts our sales” in a struggling industry.
Additionally, he said the copies are “bad quality and take away all the prestige of a book”.
Retnani said there are around 100 bookshops in the country, while Moroccan media put the figure at 250. —