The United Arab Emirates are an increasingly significant market for operators in the Indian book industry, including software, prepress, printing, and publishing enterprises. It is only logical that their presence at the region’s two most important book fairs is growing in numbers from year to year. Next to NBT’s collective booth, some 36 individual exhibitors from India attended this year’s Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, the UAE’s second-largest publishing event after the Sharjah International Book Fair held in November every year. The largest cluster of exhibitors from outside the Middle East at last year’s Sharjah International Book Fair actually came from India. Both fairs are the most important events for the book markets of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member countries Saudi-Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman.
ADIBF, directed at both industry professionals and the larger public, brought together some 1,400 exhibitors and more than 220,000 visitors on the 10 days from 26 April to 5 May, 2025. The largest exhibitor cluster from outside the UAE was again that of the Chinese book industry with around 80 booths, followed by companies from India and, for the first time, Caribbean publishers from 20 island states who represented this year’s focal theme. According to the organizers, the Arabic Language Centre, the fair featured 87 government entities, 15 universities and 28 national collective booths. Mention was also made of the 25 literary agents participating in the event, as the region has long been without a consistent presence of such agents.
In parallel with the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, the Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival took place from 23 April to 4 May at the Expo Centre of Sharjah, only 165 km away from Abu Dhabi, the UAE’s capital and third-largest city after Dubai and Sharjah. Organized by the Sharjah Book Authority also in charge of the November book fair, it attracted 126,000 participants from 167 countries.
During the festival, Sharjah Book Authority chairperson Sheikha Bodour Al Qasimi announced what is said to be the region’s first inclusive book series for young readers, in collaboration with her publishing house Kalimat. The concept of creating an inclusive series, she said, is based on, “The mission to make knowledge accessible to every child, regardless of her or his ability, and to create more inclusive, sustainable learning environments.” At the Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival, her Kalimat Foundation also announced the donation of books to Palestinian children residing at the Emirates Humanitarian City in Abu Dhabi, carried out under the ‘Pledge a Library’ initiative and launched in conjunction with the UAE’s ‘Month of Reading’ program.
With 2,200 exhibitors, last year’s 43rd Sharjah International Book Fair was attended by 1.8 million visitors on 12 days. Participants from India included FICCI, Capexil, NBT and 52 individual exhibitors. As in previous years, the event was preceded by a three-day Publishers Conference attended by 1,150 publishers and literary agents from 108 countries, facilitating matchmaking for the buying and selling of publishing and translation rights, and organizing roundtable discussions and workshops on topics such as freedom of expression, artificial intelligence, and audio books.
The Sharjah Book Authority not only organizes the book fair but is also responsible for one of the UAE’s many tax-free zones, the Sharjah Publishing City Free Zone, a 100,000 square meter facility dedicated to the book printing and publishing industries.
Qatar, in the meantime, is developing its own Doha International Book Fair, which in its 34th edition this year is running from 8 to 17 May with 522 exhibitors from 43 countries, including 11 from Palestine, this year’s Guest of Honour.
This year’s Sharjah International Book Fair will take place from 5 to 16 November, 2025. The next Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, with Indonesia as its Guest of Honour, will be held from 25 April to 4 May 2026.
