While reading books is an important activity people should consider adding to their daily or even weekly tasks, one, however, cannot deny our attention span has significantly gone down, with new things popping out every few seconds online. Additionally, people can get super busy and stressed out trying to balance out their work life, social life, trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle, and the list goes on, that the idea of reading a book completely slips out from their minds.
What if we tell you that you don’t have to read books anymore, but get to listen to them instead? And you can do it anywhere literally – while driving, at home, in bed – we mean it. Everywhere. Here’s how.
AlRawi launched back in December 2016 when three Bahrainis realized that there’s a gap in Arabic content. Hala Sulaiman, the co-founder and Managing Director, Ameera Mohammed and Mohamed Ebrahim the co-founders, decided to launch a website and an app of high-quality Arabic audiobooks with the aim of creating an e-community to convert books into interactive audio books. It is based on building a growing network of narrators consisting of broadcasters and voice-over talents who record readings of works of literature and other fields to create a digital library of audiobooks accessible to everyone, everywhere
AlRawi doesn’t only provide bookworms with a chance to listen to their favorite books, but it also creates a network of publishers, book authors, narrators, producers, artists and studios, which will eventually form an e-Marketplace for audio books. The startup has an expanding network of studios that enables the narrators to record a variety of books and summaries. “Through AlRawi, we hope to build a more culturally-aware and educated generation that helped us to make it a reality and take it to the world,” Hala Sulaiman commented.
One of the reason’s behind AlRawi’s success is Bahrain’s business friendly ecosystem that help startups launch their ideas and exponentially grow. “Bahrain’s entrepreneurial ecosystem is allowing us to flourish and grow, with the support of various organisations such as Tamkeen and the Bahrain Economic Development Board,” Hala added. The Bahrain Economic Development Board has recently launched a community initiative called StartUp Bahrain that aims to encourage entrepreneurs and startups to launch their ideas in the country.
Wondering how their app works? It’s simple! First you download the app from here. Then you can browse through their online library that’s filled with a bunch of exciting categories and subcategories. You can also use the search bar to search for books through their title, author or the narrator’s name. After that, you get to click download on whichever book you choose. But what if you find out that the genre or style of book is not your thing? Well, AlRawi founders have thought it through for you: Before downloading any book, you can listen to a sample audio clip, if you like it, you can download it, if not, then you get to move on to the next book.
AlRawi will also be adding some great features for special needs on November 1st. It’s going to include a Voice Over Service that’s going to help special needs people navigate through AlRawi app.
Furthermore, AlRawi has recently signed some strategic partnerships to provide you guys with more thrilling and educational books to listen to. One of them is with Qindeel Educational, a knowledge affiliate of the Mohamed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation, and the other one with Edara.com. These partnerships allows AlRawi users to gain access to the summaries of the world’s best sellers in business, entrepreneurship, education, personal-development in audio format — a perfect solution for busy bees who can’t listen to the entire book.
And here’s some good news for the Emirati bookworms. AlRawi will be launching at the Sharjah Book Fair starting the 1st of November, so why don’t you pass by them and say hello and give their app a try?
AlRawi is available on Apple Store and Google Play. Check out their website here if you want to know more about them, and follow them on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook @alrawibooks.
You can read the Arabic version of AlRawi’s feature here.