Cairo Book Fair -- or Cairo Blook Fair?

Marwa Rakha at Global Voices highlights a trend at the Cairo Book Fair, quoting a post from blogger Mohamed Hamdy highlighting the 15+ titles by bloggers available at the Fair, supported by CBF's first-ever seminar to discuss the growing phenomenon of bloggers getting published. The seminar is organized by the renowned writer Youssef Al Ka'eed and bloggers Ghada Abdel Aal, Shady Aslan, and Mayada Medhat. This is definitely a particularly Egyptian phenomenon, of bloggers publishing *novels* based on blogs, as opposed to essayistic or memoiristic texts...

__Updated 28/01/09__

Marwa Rakha posts more news: traditional writers have called these Egyptian blooks "Kleenex" (because they see them as over-intimate and disposable, I guess). Blogger Ahmed Al Sabbagh hits back with a link to Ghada Abdel Aal's video, where she quotes Tawfiq El-Hakim describing the essence of real literature:

It is the open air literature; the literary expression of freedom and passion; words that reach out from one heart to another exposing the depth of the human psyche in freedom, honesty, and sincerity. Tawfiq El-Hakim also said that our share of such kind of literature is minimal just as much as our share of honesty and openness is minimal - This is exactly what we as bloggers do.