TO JUDGE by Librairie Antoine in Beirut, books are faring well in the Middle East. The bright, airy branch in Beirut Souks, a shopping centre, has ceiling-to-floor shelves on all three levels. Yet even if the bookshop is as swish as any on a British or American high street, publishing in Arabic is struggling.

One reason jumps out: most of Antoine’s books are in foreign languages rather than Arabic. French and English each account for about 40% of sales; Arabic, for only 20%, according to the company. “People aren’t reading as much in Arabic, not just here but across the region,” says Emile Tyan, Librairie Antoine’s commercial director, who also heads HachetteAntoine, a joint venture with a French publisher.

Most books in Arabic are written in a formal variant that is rarely spoken, difficult and often taught badly. Mastering it takes a lot of study—and that is time many parents think would be more usefully spent learning English. HachetteAntoine has improved sales of Arabic books by using glossy covers and attractive fonts—something that has been rare for local books. But that cannot turn the tide.

Piracy is another huge problem. Few Middle Eastern countries have copyright laws or the will to pursue people when they violate them. “As soon as we publish a bestseller, five or ten companies will pop up and reprint it, in paper and online,” says Rana Idriss, the director of Dar al-Adab, a Lebanese publisher that represents famous Arabic writers such as Adonis, a pseudonymous exiled Syrian poet, and Elias Khoury, a novelist, as well as holding the rights to foreign authors including the Italian Elena Ferrante.

As with so much else in the region, the turmoil since 2011 has shaken things up—mostly for the worse. Arab authors are producing some cracking, if depressing, tales of imprisonment, war, the loss of relatives and life in exile. But on the whole, people are now reading and buying less. Iraq used to be a huge market (a Middle Eastern saying goes that books are written in Cairo, published in Beirut and read in Baghdad). Syria and Egypt were big, too although the latter makes little money because books have to be priced so cheaply.

One bright spot for publishers is, surprisingly, the Gulf; particularly its women. A growing middle class and a big community of bored expats are hungry for diversion. They read everything from romance (especially popular in Saudi Arabia) to non-fiction tracts such as self-help books. Yet publishers face big problems there from censorship. “It’s the big three—sex, politics and religion,” says Ms Idriss—the stuff a lot of good stories are made of.

The biggest challenge is that Arabs simply do not read much, whether about war or peace, in English or in Arabic, despite having achieved near-universal literacy since the 1960s. Statistics are missing or misleading. But anecdotally, the situation is getting worse. Mr Tyan says that, in a region of 380m people, the book market is about a quarter as big as Belgium’s (a country of about 11m people). Rania Zaghir, an author and publisher of children’s books (in Arabic only) blames poor schooling. “Education is dull and archaic, and leaves children with a bad relationship with books from an early age,” she says.

Ms Zaghir is trying to change that—which also helps her find ways of making money. She knocked on the door of NGOs to persuade them to buy books to distribute to refugees, of whom there are over 1m in Lebanon. She encourages young readers by holding events, readings and puppet shows based on her books. “You have to be creative to make sure reading is loved,” she says. “I consider myself Bookwoman, like Superwoman, rather than an author or publisher.”