eBooks are certainly airborne in the US and the UK, but in many other places they're still taxiing, fairly slowly, along the runway. Why? Language is one reason. English-language eBooks are ubiquitous and form the vast majority of all currently available eBooks. All the major global retailers are focused almost exclusively on English-language content. There is a proven demand for English-language eBooks and conversion to ePub is simple and cheap, so almost all publishers are now busy digitizing their front and back lists.
The story is different for non-English-language material. As industry guru Mike Shatzkin wrote in a recent blog post: "the reality that everybody in the world has to deal with is that English-language title availability in ePub dwarfs that of all other languages."
A recent PricewaterhouseCoopers report, Turning the Page - the Future of eBooks, claimed that there are 1.8 million free books available in English via Google books. The report looked in detail at eBooks in the US, the UK, the Netherlands, and Germany. It noted that while the number of eBooks in the Netherlands has now grown to 4,000 from 1,000 in 2009, that is trifling compared to the 350,000 printed books in Dutch available on the Dutch market leader bol.com. Similarly, German sites such as buecher.de have over 100,000 German eBooks but this is still only about 8% of the total German printed books available, and many of these are only in PDF rather than in a dedicated eBook format such as ePub.
Non-Roman Scripts
Part of the reason for the gap between English and non-English eBooks is that creating ePub versions of non-Roman script content is far from straightforward. Converting to a Roman-script language may involve nothing more than adding an umlaut or two, but digitizing Greek content, or Japanese, is a different matter.
There are currently two options, neither of which is ideal. Fonts can be embedded to allow a text file to be created. This is a time-consuming process. It is also not currently supported by the Kindle. The text file can be captured as an image, which is much simpler, but an image file doesn't support all of the features consumers have grown to expect from eBooks such as zoom, highlight, copy/paste, search, and so on.
In MPS' experience, most publishers with non-Roman script material, including several big UK publishers, have settled for images for content in a vast array of languages including Russian, Sanskrit, Babylonian, Arabic, Japanese, and Greek.
ePub 3.0
The introduction of ePub 3.0, in late May, will change all of this because it allows fonts to be embedded. As Bob Kasher of the ePub 3.0 Working Group explains: "Scripts such as Arabic, Tamil, Chinese, and Japanese which previously could only have been presented as saved graphic files within ePub without the support of Left/Right, Right/Left, or Vertical reading formats will now all be fully integrated into the new ePub standard." This will, he predicts, "open up tremendous opportunities for digitalizing non-Roman script languages, allowing the digital book revolution to impact on markets throughout the world as well as leading to the development of reading devices that can support these languages and scripts." As of today, though, only the iPad supports ePub 3.0.
The Language Question
For many publishers with content in minority languages, eBooks should be a natural boon: they allow relatively cheap production of a small number of books, and easy distribution to the often far-flung niche audience at whom the books are aimed. Bob Davidson at Sandstone Books, who last year brought out the first Gaelic eBooks in partnership with MPS, has a series of educational books for advanced learners of Gaelic Scottish. He was quick to see the potential eBooks had as a solution to the "logistical costs of printing and distributing to small amounts of people in Canada, Germany, and Australia".
However, eBooks can also further strengthen the hegemony of English. Demand follows supply, and because readers are often unable to buy the book they want in the language they want as an eBook many either choose the printed book, or another eBook. Some readers are shifting to English translations of the book they want, or even just other English-language books, in frustration at not being able to find the title they want. Shatzkin notes anecdotal evidence of this in several posts, including a report that "25% of the books sold in Denmark are in English."
Dr Christina Müller of PwC though, in an email interview with MPS, explained that the situation in Germany at least is quite different: "German consumers are quite conservative with respect to digital reading and prefer reading in German. My guess is that in the absence of their preferred German-language books they would rather buy the printed books-or not buy an eReader at all."
The Future
Publishers of foreign-languages that use the Roman alphabet are now starting to digitize their content in earnest, and the introduction of ePub 3.0 will clear the way for the remaining languages. No country is anywhere near the US' total of €400 million worth of eBook sales in 2009. Even the UK only scored a paltry €8 million. As more foreign-language content becomes available, though, demand for both English and non-English eBooks in countries outside the US is likely to escalate. The PwC report predicts a huge growth in eBook sales in Germany, from 0.4% today to 6.3% by 2015, for instance.
A recently released Android eReading app gives us an idea of how foreign-language eBooks may look in the future. The app, released by myeBooks.gr, allows readers to buy and read not only Greek books from the company's own site but books in any language from other bookstores. Menus of the Greek books are displayed in both English and Greek. This flexible, hybrid approach may be just the ticket.
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