Quote:
Originally Posted by Top100EbooksRank
The Japanese publishers want to kill the ebook market and they are doing a good job of it so far.
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I don't think the publishers are any more benign in the west, but eBooks in the west have one big advantage that they don't have in Japan.
That is Japan is the only place where Japanese is spoken and read in any sort of significant numbers. It is a closed market in the sense that there are no other countries that have an interest in publishing books in Japanese.
With English, Spanish, French, even German there are multiple nations, all with slightly different ideas of what is appropriate to publish in an ebook format.
Being digital, these books tend to cross the borders and create realities that western publishers have to learn to deal with. I don't know how many times I've read in this very set of forums how people in Australia, New Zealand, Britain, or sometimes even Canada have learned how to get around the geographic barriers the publishers set up to restrict sales in their countries.
I suspect, that sort of "Paid up Piracy" is a lot harder to do in a country where your country is the only source of books in your own language.
Hmmm! Now that I think about it, I wonder what the long term effects will be of both the "cross pollination" and of the linguistic isolation of some countries will be on global culture. More homogenization I suspect.