After six months of announcing Kotobna’s partial acquisition of the online gifting and stationary platform Autograph, the MIT Pan Arab Award-winning startup is now assigning part of its leadership and management to “Mohammad Abdulsalam Idris” as Co-CEO sharing the top executive duties with the main founder and other Co-CEO Mohammad Gamal.
Abdulsalam joined Kotobna three years ago as COO; his main task was to create a scalable, cost-effective, and agile operation model inside the company to provide online and printed publishing services to the growing number of customers (authors and writers) inside and outside Egypt.
During that three years, Abdulsalam succeeded in providing the company with needed infrastructure and partnerships to provide Egyptian and Arab readers with more than 1200 e-books and more than 1000 exclusive new printed titles, the execution publishing cycle of a single book has been reduced to 3 months instead of 1 to 2 years (which is the norm in the traditional publishing industry in Egypt and the Arab world).
Kotobna, which employs a team of 30 professionals, mainly in three functions: Operations & Logistics, Marketing, UX & Customer Relations, and Business Development, is now focusing on expanding its business to the gulf and north Africa, recently launched shipping printed books shipping to all GCC countries, also on diversifying how the traditional book can reach the reader, with focus on e-book experience, and audiobooks production and distribution.
Abdulsalam, an Egyptian author and theater director, graduated from the Faculty of Science, Cairo University, majoring in computer science, worked for more than 8 years in the publishing industry.
He will join Gamal to execute Kotobna’s vision to be the one-stop-shop and literature-agent for all writers and authors across the Arab world, helping them reach readers and monetize from their books and creations.
