Among the five new books that will be launched in the coming months are two that will be of topical interest and attract more attention than others.
THE FIRST TO APPEAR WILL BE EAST PAKISTAN: The Endgame: an onlooker's journal 1969-71 written by Brigadier Abdur Rahman Siddiqui (Retd) who was Director of Inter-service Public Relations during that period.
He used to preside over the daily briefings for news media during the war with India over Bangladesh.
The journal is scheduled for launching in coming March and is based on the period diaries A R Siddiqui had maintained.
The second book is the recent history written by former Chief Justice Ajmal Mian. It will be called "A Judge Speaks Out" and will cover among other things the conflict between former chief justice Syed Sajjad Ali Shah and former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, the storming of the Supreme Court of Pakistan by Muslim Leaguers, the separation of the judiciary from executive and the 8th Constitutional Amendment and the Judges' Case.
Speaking at the launching of "Memoirs of a Rebel Princess" here on Tuesday, the Managing Director of the Oxford University Press (OUP), Ameena Saiyid, expressed the believe that publishing had a real future in Pakistan and that it was the duty of publishers to encourage and cultivate writers and also develop reading habits.
At the same time, Ms Saiyid also called for strengthening of Intellectual Property Rights laws in Pakistan to curb piracy and protect the genuine publishers.
She said the OUP invested heavily in each book by commissioning authors, paying them royalties and also payments to the editors, proof-readers, designers and illustrators and invested in their promotion.
And when a title was established and its demand created, the "pirate moves in and conveniently produces fake editions" with no initial investment and cashes on others' labour.
She said that piracy was a theft and the property that was stolen often is the only source of livelihood an inventor, a writer, musician or an artist has.
She gave the examples of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Jamiluddin Aali and Mushtaq Ahmed Yusufi who, she said, had to seek jobs to survive.
Qurat-ul-Ain Haider, she said, had complained bitterly about the piracy of her books Pakistan claiming that pirates here owe Rs 1.5 million in royalties.
The other four books in the queue were: Shahla Haeri's "No Shame for the Sun" that contained six candid interviews on the lives of Pakistani professional women;
"Emergence of Bangladesh: Class Struggles in East Pakistan"; "People on the move: Punjabi Colonial and Post-Colonial Migration" which is an edited volume of Ian Tolbot and Shinder Thandi.
She did not fix a schedule for the launching of these new books.
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