Iranian Government To Open The Biggest Bookstore In The World

The Iranian government recently announced it would be opening the largest bookstore in the world – by square footage, during the coming months. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, this title was held by the Barnes & Noble bookstore in New York City, which covered 154,250ft². Though the 5th Avenue flagship store closed down in 2014.

This intention was as a result of some research carried out by the iranian government which shows that the iranians are drastically losing interest in reading.

Bookstores in Iran are a rarity, with some 1,500 shops for a population of almost 80 million. There was a time when publishers gave books a print run of 3,300-5,500 copies. Now, the numbers have dropped drastically to 500, sometimes even 300 copies....Adopted from aeon.co

The head of the Art and Cultural Organization of Tehran Municipality - Mr Mahamoud Salahi, announced that the bookstore named Bagh-e-Ketab (The Book Orchard/Garden) will be 484,376ft² (45,000m²), triple the size of the guinness world-record holder. This bookstore is expected to cater for all walks of life and ages, but will focus on youth and include an auditorium for theatre performances, and four research departments for university professors to hold workshops and study sessions.

Report shows that the Tehran municipality had already spent 100 billion riyals (more than $3 million) on the project.

Salahi told Iranian reporters ‘Currently, we are at a stage of getting the store’s equipment. We hope that all interested publishers will be able to place their work on our shelves,’ he later revealed that during 2015, he pushed for a campaign to promote reading by distributing free books and booklets on buses and subways for people. This had existed previously, but was halted three years prior, for reasons unknown.

Much of the reason for Iranians’ lack of interest in reading printed books has to do with censorship. Iran is ranked as one of the top 10 censored countries in the world. When it comes to publishing, the process is very meticulous: it can take months, sometimes years, to pass a book through the country’s Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Books must first be submitted to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance to be reviewed by at least one anonymous censor, whose job is to make sure the text follow the rules and regulations of the Islamic Republic – albeit through the censor’s interpretations of the law. The censor’s work is described in Persian as momayezi, a polite word for ‘evaluating’. The process is intricate and usually relies on the use of the ‘Ctrl+F’ approach to find specific words and phrases that might be deemed anti-Islamic, against Iranian security or immoral. For example, the kissing and dancing scenes, as well as any mention of alcohol, are changed in the Persian translation of the Harry Potter series. Sometimes, entire chapters are removed, and certain books never make into print........disclosed by aeon.co