Sutur

Blog · Behind the scenes

Why Sutur now has a library of 3,000 books

Manga is how Sutur started, but most Arabic books will never become manga. Here is why we added a plain-text library of more than 3,000.

· 3 min read

In short

  • Sutur began with manga volumes, which take days of drawing and review each, so there are a few hundred of them.
  • The new Library holds more than 3,000 Hindawi books as clean, readable text with a cover, chapters, an age rating and an author page.
  • They are free, CC BY 4.0, and you can read them online, send them to a Kindle or download an EPUB.

Manga is slow, and that is the point of it

A manga volume needs a plan, hundreds of candidate pictures, lettering, a review by a person and a publish step. That is worth doing for a book you want to love, but it means only a few hundred titles will ever be drawn. The rest of the Arabic shelf would stay invisible.

Most good books were not in Sutur at all

The Hindawi Foundation has published thousands of Arabic books under CC BY 4.0: novels, poetry, history, science for children, philosophy, translations. Readers should be able to find them in one calm place, next to the manga, without hunting through scattered files.

What a Library book gives you

Each book has its own cover, a short description, a genre and an age rating (7+, 10+, 12+, 16+ or 18+), so a parent can filter before opening anything. Inside, the text is split into chapters with a reading-time estimate, your place is saved on your account, and when you finish there is a button to invite a friend.

You can also send a book to your Kindle or download an EPUB. We fixed the EPUBs so the title, author and cover show correctly in the Kindle library.

Authors, not just titles

Every author has a page with their books, a short biography when we could verify one, and a portrait where we could draw one responsibly. Books with several authors list each of them, so you can follow a writer from one book to the next. We did not invent faces for authors we know nothing about.

How we kept the quality up

Covers are drawn by a model and the Arabic title is set by code, not by the model, so the letters are right. Books whose text had stray characters were held back until fixed, and duplicate authors were merged so one person has one page.

Library books are text, not pictures, and we say so plainly. The manga editions stay as they are, and a switch at the top of the Books page moves between Manga and Library.

Why it matters

A reading app is only as useful as what is on its shelf. The Library turns Sutur from a few dozen illustrated stories into a place where an Arabic reader of any age can start a book tonight, for free. Manga then becomes the door in, not the whole house.

Tech notes

  • SourceHindawi Foundation (safahat.org), CC BY 4.0
  • SizeMore than 3,000 text books and about 900 author pages
  • CoversModel-drawn artwork, Arabic title lettered by code
  • FormatsOnline reader, EPUB, send to Kindle
  • RatingsAge ratings 7+ to 18+ on every book

Try it yourself

  1. Open Books and switch from Manga to Library.
  2. Filter by age or genre, or search by title or author.
  3. Open a book, read a chapter, and come back later: your place is saved when you are signed in.
  4. Send it to your Kindle from the book page if you prefer a device you already own.
Read One Thousand and One NightsAge ratings