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Afghanistan's biggest bookseller launches website

03.08.2008 18:02 Arts - Source: cbc.ca

The biggest bookseller in Afghanistan, who once travelled to remote areas of the country hawking books out of a bus, is expanding his business by launching a website.

Shah Muhammad Rais, who claims to have the world's biggest collection of books on Afghanistan in major international languages, says he wants his countrymen to get reading again.

He gave up his mobile book business in 2006 due to increasing violence and security problems.

With a stockpile of nearly 1 million copies of about 2,000 different titles and another 17,000 titles in the shop's research library in his Kabul store, Shah M Book Co., Rais is practically the only game in town.

"With regret and unfortunately, I have to say that I am the main bookseller in Afghanistan," Rais told Reuters.

"There will be a crisis of books if something happens to us or if we collapse. So, it is very important that we have others involved in this too," he said.

Rais, who has an engineering degree, has been involved in the book trade for 35 years and is well known to many expatriates in Kabul as well as Afghan book lovers.

Book reading suffers after 3 decades of war

He says the habit of book reading has suffered due to three decades of war, which have decimated literacy rates in the country, once brimming with scholars, writers and poets.

"Through books, our kids would know about their culture, history and understand the world. Books are like seas. You have to dive into the sea to get the pearl. You have to read books to know how to solve your country's problems," Rais, an engineer by trade, notes.

He became known outside the country after a visiting Norwegian journalist wrote a book about him just months after the Taliban's fall in 2001.

However, Rais has distanced himself from The Bookseller of Kabul.The novel, which depicts him as brutal with his family, sold more than a million copies.

He has since rectified that problem. Rais recently published his own memoir: Once Upon a Time There Was A Bookseller in Kabul.

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Shah M Book Co. website

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