Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
The local publishers will know the local market, the local media, the local taxes, and will have a greater incentive to translate and sell works.
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However, the people who live in a country that is a tiny market (say, one million people) will
never have local access to most books - not even most international bestsellers, as the market just cannot bear it. It doesn't matter how much incentive there will be - the local publishers in small markets simply won't be able to translate and publish even a tiny fraction of all books some of their readers might be interested in. For all other books, the authors will lose out.
And in addition, plenty of people even in countries with big local markets don't have any interest in buying and reading translations. If I am able to read a book in the original language, I'm not going to read the translation, and I'm not alone in this. (I'm not putting down translations. I'm a translator by occupation, and I've translated a handful of books among other things. The result, no matter how good, isn't comparable to reading the book in the language it was written in, in the author's own words.)
Keeping the native-English-language markets split makes a certain sense (although I'm quite sure that people in those markets are no less irritated for not having access to books none of their local publishers have bought). Selling translation rights to not-English-language markets certainly makes sense. But keeping international rights for the original (I use English as the example, as that's the current prevalent language in the ebook world) and refusing to sell English ebooks globally (outside the separate English-language markets) is just the author and/or publisher excluding potential customers and giving up income.
Which is their prerogative, of course. But as someone in a very small not-English-language market who reads books in English almost exclusively, it's my prerogative to be irritated by people not wanting my money when I'm willing to pay them, and by having to jump through hoops and break rules and pretend I'm American just to be able to buy a book.
Yes, there is a certain sense of entitlement involved, I admit - if all my friends are allowed to read a book, and talk about it, and praise it, then it feels rather depressing to not be allowed to read it because I happened to be born in another country - but even with that, I still think it would also be in the authors' interest if people like me were allowed to give them our money.
As for local taxes, Amazon UK charges me my local VAT (not UK VAT) for physical goods they sell me, so having the point of sales being the seller's location seems to be an issue that can be resolved.
(I suppose there is the theoretical danger of local publishers not wanting to buy the translation rights if their local population has access to the original, but in my experience, most people in any country don't have language skills good enough to read in a foreign language without too much effort, so that danger should for the time being still be not too great.)
Of course my arguments stem from
my convenience, but I'd really like to know how excluding a large number of potential customers like me is in anyone's interest, least of all the author's.