Picture used for illustrative purposes only.

Fiction and activity books are in good demand at the Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival (SCRF 2023) as we witnessed a huge demands of paper books during the COVID-19 pandemic, said Iftikhar Ahmed Khan of At Two Books, one of participants at the Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival (SCRF 2023) with hundreds of children books covering a wide range of topics.

“We are based in Dubai and branch in Lahore, Pakistan importing books from USA and Europe and distribute to clients including individuals, libraries and academic institutes in UAE and Pakistan.

At this platform, we are seeing the interest of young readers in our books especially in board books, storybooks, fiction and non-fiction interested to young readers. The response we are getting on our collection from the parents and schoolchildren is amazing,” he said.

This publishing and distribution firm is over 10 years old and has been taking part in the Sharjah book festivals for the last five years with hundreds of titles from around the world in English and Arabic languages.

“Besides participating in the book fair in the UAE, we are also providing books under the International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) to academic. The reading habits among the UAE population is high. Parents are educated and they pushed their children to read more as schools also want children to indulge in reading beyond their curriculum. Everyone knows that book is a best friend and we are lucky to see that people in this country treat books as a treasure,” he said.

Vijay Thakur of Books Venue said that they are one of the largest online book platform and presenting physically at the SCRF 2023 to enjoy the Sharjah’s unique positions among the book lovers.

“We are a start-up firm and cater to every segment of the society from individual to corporate and academic institutes with the availability of 15 million books online at our platform. We fulfil the demand of anyone who wants a book in any language or subject and procure from anywhere in the world,” he said.

The office set up in JLT, Dubai and paving the way to enlist more books everyday with the aim of touching the number to 20 million books on their online platform.

However, Dubai-based DC Books at the SCRF has been seeing good number of corporate orders of children books from local libraries and schools.

“We are biggest publisher of Malayalam language books in India and have been participating in book fairs with a wide range of books attracted to all segments of the society but at the SCRF our collection is more like children books ranging every topics,” said Jesudas Sanjay.