5 months ago
31
AMSTERDAM: When Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan was in the Netherlands a few years ago promoting her most recent novel, "The Candy House", she noticed something unexpected. Most of the people who asked her to
sign books
at author events were not presenting her with copies in Dutch. "The majority of the books I was selling were in English." Her impression was right.
In the Netherlands, according to her Dutch publisher, De Arbeiderspers, 65% of sales for "The Candy House" were in English.
As English fluency has increased in Europe, more readers have started buying American and British books in the original language, forgoing the translated versions that are published locally. This is especially true in Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands and, increasingly, Germany, which is one of the largest book markets in the world. Publishers in those countries, as well as agents in the US and Britain, worry this could undercut the market for translated books.
The
English-language books
selling abroad are generally cheap paperbacks, printed by American and British publishers as export editions. Those versions are much less expensive than hardcovers available in the US, for example, and much less expensive than the same books in translation, which have to observe minimum pricing in countries like Germany.
English sales have accelerated in recent years, in part because books now go viral on social media, especially TikTok. Booksellers in the Netherlands said many young people prefer to buy books in English with original covers, even if Dutch is their first language, because those are the books they see and want to post about on BookTok. Christian Schumacher-Gebler, CEO of the Bonnier Publishing Group in Germany, said this could hit authors in many ways. They would miss out on royalties from translated editions, which are higher than the payment they receive from inexpensive export copies.
In an effort to combat the English-language appeal of TikTok, some Dutch publishers have started to release translated books under their English titles, with covers that are similar, or the same, as the original designs. "We are in the middle of a transition," said Simon Dikker Hupkes, a commissioning editor at a Dutch publisher.
Bookstores have adapted to the trend too, buying more English-language versions of popular book. In fact, some booksellers said they were pleased that people were buying books, regardless of the language. Jan Peter Prenger, chief buyer at Libris, a large group of independent bookstores in the Netherlands, said for the first time since the 1960s, 15-year-olds are back in bookstores in droves. "That's gold," he said.
