CAIRO, Egypt, May 7, 2002 — With Egypt currently in the throes of an economic crisis and secular publishers reporting sales down between 40 and 60 per cent on the previous year, the Bible Society of Egypt was expecting the worse.
"When we calculated all the income from the four stalls at the Bookfair, and all our outlets across the country during the whole period during which we had our Bookfair sale, we found to our amazement that sales this year were more than 40 per cent higher than last!" said Ramez Attallah, the Society's General Secretary.
More than 250,000 cassette tapes, 36,000 video tapes, 19,000 CDs, 78,000 New Testaments and 24,000 Bibles were sold during the book fair
Mr Atallah attributed the encouraging sales in part to the Society's having developed "a variety of creative distribution channels". Its eight bookshops include a stall in a sports club and another at the busiest rest stop along the highway linking the capital, Cairo, to Alexandria, the second-largest city.
Recently the Society's publicity has included press advertisements, television commercials and large billboards on the Cairo-Alexandria road.
Another service the Society offers is the home delivery of orders.
"In spite of working 18 hours a day, the motorcycle rider was not able to keep up with all the orders that came in whenever we had an advertisement in the newspaper or on TV," said Mr Atallah. "Eventually we had to hire a courier service to help meet the backlog of orders!"
He described how during last year's bookfair one of the Society's accountants gave his pastor the New Testament on cassette tape as a gift. The pastor, who already owned a copy, passed it on to his barber, a nominal Christian, who spent the whole year listening to the tapes and found his life being transformed by them.
"Even though the barber is illiterate," said Mr Atallah, "he has not only become a committed Christian but is also very knowledgeable about the Scriptures and shows a great ability [with] different passages in the Scriptures. Haircuts now take a very long time while the barber discusses the Bible with his pastor!"
Source: United Bible Societies
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