Good, and not so good, news! The US embassy in Jordan was very helpful, thank you Azmi Tubbeh. Not only will he research whether there is an electronic copy of the Federalist Papers in arabic available at the jordanian publishers, he informed me that there is an entire book list that was requested by Iraq that they are already delivering. This means that if people wish to assist in helping with the distribution of such books, there is already an established channel that we can help out with. The list of books that was actually requested is promised and I'll publish it when I get it.
Because of the vagaries of the publishing industry (which, it appears, are the same the world over) there is currently a shortage of Federalist Papers in Arabic and the Jordanian publisher will not be printing more copies. Mr. Tubbeh believes that the book was physically typeset and will be sending me a physical copy for scanning/OCR if an electronic copy cannot be found. The US embassy in Cairo is going to undertake the reprint with an Egyptian publisher. I have the name and email (yay, no more international phoning!) of the person at the embassy in Cairo handling this and will pursue my hunt for the electronic version there.
Posted by TMLutas at December 8, 2003 07:18 AM