booklab

Books allow ideas and stories to travel, and translations are the vehicle of choice. Oddly enough for such a fundamental mechanism at the core of culture and cultural diversity, we have little precise knowledge, and certainly no data based analysis about the patterns formed by those flows, and even less about the forces driving or hindering the exchange.

After having tried to map the flows of translation across Europe at the most general level in the “Diversity Report 2008”, the present analysis has the ambition to break down those general observations to the level of individual (fiction) authors and their work, and track how they move across languages, or how they do not. Metaphorically speaking, we try to get from a general physical map of the European landscape of translations to a road map.

Findings include:

1. Books translated from English represent on average about one third of the bestselling authors and titles across the continents, with only Sweden being significant exception;
2. The UK bestseller market is by far the most averse to translations.
3. As one consequence, national preferences show a much wider variety of – particularly domestic – authors and books, representing on average another solid third of the top segment, to the effect that countries’ reading preferences seem to be much more diverse, than ‘homogeneous’ across Europe;
4. Only a small group of authors writing in ‘other’ languages than English or the respective local majority vernacular succeed with translations of their work in a larger number of markets and countries, with some like Larsson and Zafón out-competing their Anglo-Saxon peers;
5. The very top segment in bestseller lists is a very narrow segment indeed, propelling just 2 or 3 authors in their own category for each country, with the singularity of this high peak marking a significant distinction between markets, and remarkably, it is the UK and Sweden, or two markets with a particularly high percentage of domestic authors on top, where the entire curve of the bestselling authors is considerably flatter than in countries with lesser impact of domestic authors;
6. At least for the past few years, a recognizable number of European, non-English writing bestseller authors evolved and found a broad mainstream readership across markets and languages, yet exclusively authors from “Western” (or “old”) Europe, forming an exclusive club which is almost impossible to access for authors e.g. from CEE.This West-East “one way street” described above is the only pattern where West & East forms meaningful categories, just as “big” and “small” languages and markets of origin seem to play a far smaller role than often assumed;
7. While in EUWest, no systematic distinction between a (‘high’) literary elite and eventual access to the top bestselling segment across Europe through translations seems to prevail, this is clearly the case for authors from CEE who made their way to the European literary ‘elite’, but as niche authors, not as authors found access to the European mainstream book readership.
8. The diversity in fiction bestsellers in terms of treated topics, background of the authors, tonalities and styles is huge, and many of the most successful authors are initially ‘made by readers’, and not planned, contradicting, in the initial career of authors and their successful books, the popular notion of bestsellers being engineered and homogenous.

These findings come with a few provocative insights.

• The market for rights and licenses which is currently the core driver for translations, does not take in the full spectrum and diversity of what is on offer from authors across Europe, nor what seems to be reader’s preferences. Instead, only a limited set of authors from a restricted set of backgrounds are given the full access to the European reading markets, despite the fact that the recent careers of European non-English writing authors provide strong indications that an appreciative readership for such a wide diversity may exist. The funding policies for translations lack the information and the tools for a realistic assessment of their efficiency.

• The data compiled and, at least partly, analyzed for this report suggest that a more differentiated and realistic picture of the cultural dimensions of the European book and reading markets can actually be developed;
• The ambivalent role of English as a bottleneck and as a driving force:
  All general translation data show the evidence of how little is translated into English, if compared to other target languages; and yet more of the ‘elite’ authors are available in English than what is generally assumed. English therefore plays a significant role as a transfer language (together with French and German), a factor of growing importance as the readiness of reading literature in certain foreign languages (most often this means: in English) seems to spread. In many markets, English reading of books written not only in English, but in any language seems to expand, and new digital technologies will drive this development forcefully in the near future.
• For policy makers, this brings up the critical question of either continuing to focus on translations between the many languages, or to also emphasize lead programs of translations into English.
• The potential for innovation by digital:
  As digital distribution currently picks up momentum with electronic reading devices and most new titles being rapidly available not only in print, but also in digital formats, there is a strong likeliness that books in translation as well as in their original editions (or in one transfer language, notably in English) will spread much more easily than in the past; this aspect has the potential to develop into a “game changing” mechanism for all kinds of niche reading, hence for literary translations, within a relatively short period of time.

The full “Diversity Report 2009” is ready for download at www.wischenbart.com/translation .

Preparing for Frankfurt? Find a detailed analysis of the Global Ranking of the Publishing Industry in a close up analysis

In German here

In English with focus on trade publishing here > go to October 2009 newsletter

In English with a focus on professional / science / education and on globalizatioon here :

A survey portraying the top 50 publishing groups worldwide, with a revenue based ranking, trends and developments for the past 3 years - and lots of insights to be drawn from those data.

The Global Ranking portrays the industry’s top companies in a truly global perspective, highlights change and continuity, and the forces that drive it. The editors in chief of the leading professional trade magazines analyze how the economy and technology as well as globalization re-shape publishing today.

Speakers: Fabrice Piault (Livres Hebdo), Nigel Roby (The Bookseller), Thomas Wilking (buchreport), and Brian Kenny (Publishers Weekly). Rüdiger Wischenbart, moderator.

Where: Hall 8.0 Clients’ Lounge L993
When: Wednesday, 14 October 2009, 11:00 – 11:45 am

I admit that I would go a long way only to find a reason to put up this unique picture featuring comic legend Dennis Patrick in his hay day as a pop culture icon likened until today by his fans to Elvis Presley or Lucille Ball.

But I don’t need to be original myself. It is good enough to do my humble job as a chronicler of current international book bestseller lists.

To my great surprise, this month’s top Italian charts are headed by Patrick’s famous “Auntie Mame” (”Zia Mame”), an unlikely winner as the book was originally published in the 1950s in the US, reprinted in many languages and editions ever since, yet without much of a fuss.

But at once, it rings a bell with Italians at this moment. Of course one may point to the co-incidence with another juicy title, “Papi” - refering to Italy’s Prime Minister as a much admired hero of young girls and, once again, of political havoc recently - so perhaps one more time, those damned bestseller lists are more telling about what is going on than most of us would suspect.

Which is why, for more than four years now, we are analyzing them. And you can find our reading of those lists, and what they reveal, in many of the leading international book trade magazines, like the Bookseller, Publishers Weekly, Livres Hebdo, buchreport, Svensk Bokhandel, China Publishing Today or, speaking of Italy, in Informazioni Editoriali. And you find back issues of our insights here.

It is about tracking all the diversity in books across markets and languages. And one thrilling aspect is to identify possibly interesting new writer’s talent as it appears first in its original cultural environment. This is why from next month on, we will highlight a “title of the month” together with our analysis - in our partner magazines as well as here on this blog.

Following the controversy around the Google Settlement and European publishers’ and author (and collecting) societies, one could assume to witness a battle between a bunch of European Jedi knights against that Dark Vader from Mountain View, California. From a more detached reader’s point of view, things are clearly more complex.

While Google chose to digitize works from libraries at a massive scale since 2004, European representatives of copyright holders call on lawyers and legislators to fight the US settlement between the industry giant and stakeholders such as author and publishing representatives in a stand off that, in Germany or Austria in particular, has taken on the forms of cultural wars.

If things were so simple though.

A good moment of research in the database of Europeana, the European digital library network opposing Google, generates rather puzzling results.

First of all, pictures by far outnumber texts. Take Thomas Mann (1875 - 1955), the German Nobel laureate of 1929. We find 152 pictures and 45 text files, out of which only 10 are works by Thomas Mann. 9 of those are in Hungarian, 1 in Greek which can’t be opened. The Hungarian files include major works of Mann in full text, such as the Tonio Kröger, published initially in German in 1903.

The digital collection of modern classics of the Hungarian ‘Széchényi‘ National Library is impressive indeed. It includes such master pieces as the collected short stories of the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges, or the novel  “La Peste” by French Nobel laureate Albert Camus, all in Hungarian translation.

A copyright note to the digital collection, identifying the “Hungarian Electronic Library” MEK as the “administrator” of the public site, indicates:

„The copyright and other privileges are owned by the author/owner of the document (if he/she is known). If the author or owner expressly specifies conditions regarding the distribution and usage somewhere in this text, then those terms overrule the limitations stated below. Furthermore he or she is responsible for that too, that the distribution of this document in electronic form doesn’t hurt some other person authorship rights.”

And it furthermore allows a stunning set of free usages of its pages , clearly disregarding any copyright restrictions on the original works which it puts on display in Hungarian translation (for which, we hope at least, they have acquired the digital rights):

„This document can be freely copied and distributed, but you can use it only for personal purposes and non-commercial applications, without modifying it, and with proper citation to the original source.”

Another good example is French modern classic Paul Valéry, whose digitization by Google from US library copies was one of the starting points for the rage of France against the Anglo-dominated cultural effort of bringing books onto the Internet in the first place (with Europeana being one of the most direct results of the case).

Looking up texts by Paul Valéry (1871 - 1945) in Europeana results in 10 links to digital texts, none in French, and most from the Slovenian National and University Library of Ljubljana, including “The Crisis of the Mind”, a key text of Valéry’s. The two letters - “Kriza duha” in Slovenian - have been published initially in 1919 in English by Athenaeum in London, and then reproduced, in French in August of the same year, in “La Nouvelle Revue Francaise”.

As the Slovenian National Library provides no clues as to the printed sources (aside from a bland “From the collections of Variteté A.D.”), nor the translator nor the copyright, I found those details instead on the original publication of Valéry’s letters with another digital version , put up onto the web by a Massachusetts based organization, “The History Guide“,  which aims at giving students and teachers good content to “revolutionizing education in the spirit of socratic wisdom” and issuing, as it goes, its own ‘creative commons’ kind of conditions of usage with its site.

In fact, this is not the only online ressource for Valéry’s seminal pamphlet. The Université du Québec à Chicoutimi is so proud of its digital (French) version of “La crise de l’esprit” that it not only places it in a nice layout, but even adds the name and Email address of the person who did the digital version so nicely, Pierre Palpant. Thank you very much for your help indeed!

In return, “La crise de l’esprit” cannot be retrieved from Europeana, or its source, “Gallica“, the pride of “La Bibliothèque nationale de France”, BnF, for copyright reasons.

As for Thomas Mann’s “Tonio Kröger”, I can find it full text at Scribd, a generally ‘legal’ portal, yet with lots of copyrighted, not so kosher reading stuff uploaded by and for students as well, and - my favorite finding by far - anpther copy at the most popular Italian dating site, “Amore Infinito“, in a bi-lingual version as a translation exercise and promo sample for its translator Heinrich F. Fleck who even claims a copyright for his translation, and refers to “casa Fisher” (recte Frankfurt based Holtzbrinck daughter S. Fischer) for the original rights.

At Google books, I find most texts by Mann and Valéry with only their bibliographical data, yet no quotes, but an English collection of Valéry’s “Writings“, including some of his poems in French, in a still available edition of “New Directions”, the famous house of Ezra Pound, William Carlos William, or more recently, Robert Walser and Roberto Bolano.

“Tonio Kröger”, of course, is also available as an e-Book for legal download, for instance at Mobipocket at Euro 1,20.

It is all a big mess indeed.

This by far non-exhaustive research of only a few titles of two writers, a French and a German modern classic, neither one a bestseller for their rights holder, Holtzbrinck’s S. Fischer for Thomas Mann, and Gallimard for Paul Valéry, are good enough though to provide a glimpse on the many mirrors reflecting books and related copyrighted material (or, even more so, so called orphaned works with no obvious rights holder to ask for permissions) onto the web. For good reasons, I excluded any notorious piracy sites in this research.

As a reader, I have serious doubts that at this stage, a good solution for me can evolve out of a legal battle between author or publisher organizations, and the likes of Google. And yet, of course, I want rights to be respected, and writers and others who are adding value to be paid.

It certainly must not be rewarded that one actor, in this case Google, decided to move first forcefully, and than, reluctantly, may comply to questions asked later. And I share the deep skepticism towards Google’s growing clout on the “world text mass” (”Welttextmasse“), the wonderful term coined by the ever good intuition of Peter Glaser. Furthermore it is not acceptable to simply apply US law to Europe.

This said, I must add that I don’t see either any reasonable perspective in expecting the same committees of stakeholder organizations who so far did not produce a lot more than angry calls for a silly “battle for our culture” may come up now with anything more meaningful or productive than over the past five years, since Google started its digitization of libraries on a grand scale.

Instead I consider some European version of a “fair use” formula a desirable perspective, and a European equivalent of the Google settlement is most likely the best and the most realistic way of developing a balanced system for handling copyrighted content on the Internet - with the creators AND the readers in mind. With no such settlement, all that we get is huge bills for lawyers, and little rewards (yet a huge chaos) for everybody else.

Interestingly, the outgoing Commissioner for the Information Society at the European Commission, Viviane Reding, has had the most clear words in this respect recently, as she said: “If we do not reform our European copyright rules on orphan works and libraries swiftly, digitisation and the development of attractive content offers will not take place in Europe, but on the other side of the Atlantic.”

As a footnote, I want to add that even if one doesn’t buy into the argument of Mrs Reding’s statement (which I consider as highly appropriate though), it is to be noted that she at least speaks about that process in a perspective for the future  - while most self appointed defenders of the endangered book culture speak of it only in the past tense.

The Jedi knights and Dark Vader are certainly great fun in a movie, or a novel. But they do not provide a valid blueprint for what needs to be done for us readers, or for authors or publishers.

Deutsche Fassung hier.

“Wanted: The global bestseller.
A new study shows: Only a few writers are successful on a global scale. Yet national bookmarkets are diverse (not homogenized).” Article“

According to our charts, he was probably the most stunning author across Europe in 2008, and now his book makes it to the movies: “Män som hatar kvinnor“. You don’t recognize the smash hit?

This weekend, Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo”, volume one of his Millennium series, is opening - in Sweden and Denmark.

This is all about the really counter-intuitive story of a feverish Swedish investigative journalist who, to make some money for his retirement, writes a series of 3 crime novels, but does so in a way that normally guarantees it that the book is not a success. The author dies only a week after bringing the manuscript to his publisher who, of course, recognizes the jewel he got and publishes the book. The rest is probably the most iconic legend about writing and publishing in these days.

Introducing “The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize” Long list, Boyd Tonkin, literary editor of The Independent likens Larsson together with Chilean Roberto Bolano’s “2666” (currently #14 in the UK charts) as the perfect examples for novels which, under conventional wisdom, should never ever make it into any bestseller charts, as both books are “very long, complicated, sometimes eccentric and driven by a quixotic idealism”, have a dead author and are translations- and yet.

The really amazing thing about the Larsson movie however is that after such a unique performance, it has not been turned into some Hollywood blockbuster with a cast of international stars. Instead it is a Danish production, directed by Berlin festival winner of 2006, Niels Arden Oplev.

Livres Hebdo reports that the movie may open the French movie festival in Cannes in May 2009, and that so far, volume 2 and 3 of the Millennium series are set to hit only TV and DVD screens, not the cinema. So far, TV rights for France have not been sold, but Canal+ seems to be closest.

Which just teaches a good lesson about culture and arts being much more complex as popular myths of “global homogenization” have it.

Our Global bestseller list has been featured in the week’s buchreport.express, and buchreport online - Germany’s leading source of book market information.

The list which has been established for the first time ever, based on bestseller information from across Europe, the USA, and China, has had braod media attention, including The Bookseller, The Guardian and Associated Press.

While it is frightening to see in this very moment how the new Mandarin hotel next to Rem Kohlhas’ CCTV tower is burning, I was checking all kinds of sources on news with regard to China’s publishing landscape.

Friends told me that the crisis so far did not have any knock out impact on the industry, but at the same time, I hear a lot of lines about “restructuring” - or reconsidering all to bold and expansive strategies in publishing companies.

We learn for instance that Liaoning Press which was the first publishing company allowed to go public at the Shanghai Stock exchange in 2008 has been re-branded as North United Publishing and Media (Group) Co., Ltd. More significantly, most of the major Shanghai based publishing groups have been encouraged to become more of  ‘companies’ instead of state run cultural agents, and yet another publisher - Reader Publishing Group in Gansu Province -  is also preparing to go public.

The annual Beijing domestic book fair held in January says in releases that business concluded with 2.5 bn RMB worth of deals (ca. 200 m up as compared to 2008).

Also, translations which had shown tremendous growth to an estimated 10,000 titles sold into China for translation per year, seem to remain solid. In a workshop sponsored by the British Council, it was announced that China will be the guest of honor at the London Book fair in 2012 (after being in that role in Frankfurt later this year).

Forcasts e.g. in China Daily have it that books about macro economics as well as the now exactly 30 years of China’s opening may be among the top issues in the year’s new releases.

In fact in  the top bestseller segment, the controversial “Currency Wars” (货币战争) by Song Hongbing  is back as #1 in non fiction. And 30 years of the special economic zone in Shenzhen have been turned into a novel called “Destiny” (命运 ) by Lu Tianming.

Much more interestingly in terms of international reach is the clear trend that more and more regularly, books from Chinese authors are given prominent recognition abroad. In a piece in the New Yorker, the broadening reciprocal exchange of books and ideas via translations in both direction has been recently discussed - and compared to the lack of such an exchange with the Arab world.

Pankaj Mishra reviewed the English translation of the in its Chinese edition hugely successful novel “Brothers” by Yu Hua  in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. But also the very dark The Vagrants: A Novel, a captivating new book on the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution, by short story writer Li Liyun, got instantly attention and appraisal in the Times as the English translation was released by Random House.

In the most recent Chinese bestseller lists provided by China Publishing Today, a new novel, long listed at last year’s Man AsiaLiterary Award, Murong Xuecun, hit the charts, “Dance the Red Dust” (原谅我红尘颠倒), while his earlier book “Leave Me Alone, Chengdu” was given a German translation at Zweitausendeins.

So one can be cautiously optimistic that the flow of books and ideas between China and us starts to broaden from the odd trickle that it once was into a quite robust - and exciting - stream.

The next step ahead however would need to involve more sophisticated and also two sided working relationships between publishers and editors from the West with their counterparts in Chinese publishing houses - which used to be for so long just this: state controlled government agencies.

Publishers Weekly (PW), once acclaimed as “the Bible” on US publishing, fires 4 members of its staff, including editor-in-chief Sara Nelson.

PW is owned by Reed Business Information, the professional magazine division of Reed Elsevier which was for sale throughout most of 2008 and, finding obviously no buyer, was subject to restructuring plans even before the current financial downturn had hit.

Sara Nelson, formerly a highly acclaimed reporter for the early days media start up insight.com, had been hired by PW in 2005 to renew the magazine. She made her reputation at PW quickly as an outspoken  voice on the industry and thereby helped to sharpen the profile of the old lady that PW has been for a long time.

The magazine’s move obviously triggers many questions on the publication’s strategy ahead.