I mentioned new e-publisher Restless Books a few weeks ago, and now at The Los Angeles Times' Jacket Copy Hector Tobar profiles Ilan Stavans' new polyglot project: Multilingual e-book publishing.
It makes me cringe to see Stavans claim: "Only 3% of books published annually in the United States are translations" -- a 'fact' he offers no substantiation for (because there is none, beyond that it's an oft-repeated claim; the actual percentage may well be considerably lower, but as I've noted ad nauseam (but apparently to little effect) at this weblog, it all depends on what and how you're counting, and even once you've figured that out: no one has done a convincing job of tallying up a percentage yet).
On the other hand, you have to like his conviction that:
It makes me cringe to see Stavans claim: "Only 3% of books published annually in the United States are translations" -- a 'fact' he offers no substantiation for (because there is none, beyond that it's an oft-repeated claim; the actual percentage may well be considerably lower, but as I've noted ad nauseam (but apparently to little effect) at this weblog, it all depends on what and how you're counting, and even once you've figured that out: no one has done a convincing job of tallying up a percentage yet).
On the other hand, you have to like his conviction that:
U.S. readers are "fed up of with the parochial diet" supplied by most American publishersIn any case, their program looks promising, and I look forward to seeing some of these titles (well, given that they're only available in e-formats, my eagerness is somewhat tempered -- but the texts themselves sound like they might be worth even the e-reading hardship ...).