Showing off the other side of KL

I WAS in Wigtown in November, a town with a population of less than 1,000 souls, yet it has 15 bookshops. It is officially Scotland’s “national book town”.

It is home to the Wigtown Book Festival, which is now in its 20th year. The town comes alive every autumn with visitors coming from all over the world. It is heaven for book lovers. As I have written in my piece, “A book town named Wigtown” (https://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/culture/2019/11/23/scottish), I met one of the key characters in Wigtown’s journey from obscurity to international fame.

He was Shaun Bythell, the owner of “The Book Shop” and author of two hugely interesting books about being a bookseller, The Diary of a Bookseller and Confessions of a Bookseller. The Book Shop is the biggest second-hand bookshop in Scotland.

But Wigtown is more than just about bookshops, booksellers and the book festival. “The Open Book” concept is interesting. It is labelled as “both an Airbnb rental and a bookshop”.

People simply want to live their dream, running a bookshop without having to own one. The Open Book idea is managed by members of the Wigtown Book Festival.

So, I am understandably excited when Kuala Lumpur is named the World Book Capital for Unesco this year.

Kuala Lumpur is not a small town nor it is an intellectual oasis like Wigtown. It is a sprawling metropolis, a maximum city that is being defined by its skyline.

The previous honour was given to cities and towns like Sharjah (UAE) in 2019, Athens (Greece) in 2018, Conakry (Republic Guinea) in 2017, Wroclaw (Poland) in 2016 and Incheon (South Korea) in 2015. The theme this year is “KL Baca – Caring Through Reading”.

It is certainly a challenge to fill the role

of a Unesco book capital. Kuala Lumpur is capital to many other things – commerce, banking, business, chaos, noise and the homeless. It has yet to position itself as a heaven

for culture and the arts. Or as a mecca for books.

Kuala Lumpur is simply too busy building structures and planning infrastructures, seldom taking stock to question its identity and soul.

The city is all about managing its traffic and building new shopping complexes but not about providing the ecosystem for the arts to flourish or for books to be in abundance.

Books are merely another commercial item, for they are not always treated as artefacts or civilisation.

This year, it is a golden opportunity for KL to show its other side – the intellectual side. It was selected because of its “strong focus on inclusive education, the development of a knowledge-based society and accessible reading for all parts of the city’s population”, according to Unesco.

More importantly, we hope to invigorate the publishing industry in the country. We are not doing well on that score.

Our publishing industry is half the value of the chicken broiler industry and a third of the recycled trash industry. We hardly publish 17,000 titles a year, and 70% of those are textbooks and workbooks.

The book industry is well and fine in most country, but not ours. Writers can’t live on royalties. Publishers have a hard time balancing their account.

Our copyright law is there to protect the stakeholders, but like all things Malaysia, the enforcement is dismal.

A book is published every 30 seconds somewhere in the world, according to the book, Too Many Books by Gabriel Zaid.

A million titles every year will see the light of day. The death of books is still an exaggeration.

Writers in many parts of the world are making money from royalties, but not in Malaysia.

We need the right mindset and the appropriate ecosystem for books to flourish. Our people are not reading books. Perhaps we can blame TV and the social media for that, though it is only part of the problems bedevilling the local book industry.

We are ferocious users of social media. Out of a population of 32 million, 25 million of us are Internet users, 24 million are active social media users and 21 million are using mobile and smartphones. On the average, Malaysians spend six hours a day on their smart gadgets.

Back in the 1980s, the National Book Development Council made a shocking revelation. Malaysian reads half a page of book a year. That was the time before Internet and social media!

This is the time for us to show what books meant to us as a nation. This is an opportunity to showcase our love for books. For the whole year we must portray KL as a city of knowledge and not just a city of bricks and structures.

Johan Jaaffar was a journalist, editor and for some years chairman of a media company, and is passionate about all things literature and the arts. And a diehard rugby fan. The views expressed here are entirely his own.