Quote:
Originally Posted by Tizzalicious
Before, if I wanted to read and English book, I would have to 1. pay twice as much as for the Dutch translation.
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This is a true surprise to me.
Many, many years ago I switched to reading most of my books in english for 2 reasons:
a. Dutch publishers were(are?) incredibly unreliable in publishing translated series. It would happen frequently that a series of for example eight books would only get published up to the fourth or fifth book of the series.
and
b. I quickly discovered that the original english (and german) versions of books were a lot cheaper than the dutch translations. And I mean a lot! I would pay 50 Gulden (old currency) for a translated version of Wingrove's Chung Kuo books, but when I ordered it abroad it would cost me no more than 17, perhaps 20 Gulden, including shipping and handling.
I always supposed that this huge difference in price could be explained by the fact that there are many more english language speakers than there are dutch language speakers.
Being a devourer of books this was a huge boon. It felt like I was earning heaps of money with every book I read
.