This is all pure speculation, but I see three interrelated outcomes from such an e-book revolution that would wreck havoc (well, havoc from my point of view) on book culture as a whole.

If e-books become popular—and all indications are that sales will continue to increase for years to come—bookstores will be decimated. As usual, the indie stores will go first. Their profit margins are so tiny that the slightest change is potentially devastating. I have no idea what the correct number might be, but it seems to me that if 20% or more of book sales are of e-books purchased directly from an online provider (such as Amazon.com) or from the publisher directly, then it’ll be next to impossible for smaller indie stores to survive. (I do think that “institutions” like St. Mark’s or Elliott Bay or City Lights will continue to make it, but who knows? A couple of years ago I would’ve said the same thing about Cody’s and Shaman Drum.)

The biggest challenge that these bookstores face is trying to integrate e-books into their business model. And although there are some young, hip, smart booksellers trying to figure this out, I have a hard time imagining how this would work. There’s no incentive (aside from a moral one) to purchase an e-book at your local bookstore if it’s just as cheap, easy, and convenient to do it directly through the device’s wireless link to an online retailer. Sure, it’s possible that the model of paying $20 for a hardcover and $25 for the hardcover and e-book versions might work for some books, or in some limited way, but as a universal model that keeps indie bookstores afloat? Doubtful . . .

Digressing for a minute here, but one thing I’d miss if e-books took over the world is repurchasing my favorite titles. Just last week I bought new versions of Crying of Lot 49 and JR. Why? Just because they looked cool in comparison to the beat down versions I have at home. Then again, I’m a sucker for matching series, or a matching look for an author. And when a certain author/line is overhauled, I want to buy them all again . . . Another good example is the Penguin Great Ideas series. I would own none of these if it wasn’t for the simple and cool format and look. And I’ll rebuy books I already have to make sure I get the whole damn series. How will that be conveyed in e-form? With cool jpgs? Wow—there’s a new jpg cover of Hopscotch! I definitely have to download the unadorned text again . . . er, well, no. Nevermind.

And if you think indie stores will be the only ones effected by an e-revolution, you’re much more optimistic than I am. Barnes & Noble is already looking down the barrel, which is why they launched their e-book store last month (the “largest in the world!”) and inked a deal with PlasticLogic to start selling their own e-device. Sony and Borders have had a partnership for some time now, but Borders is still on the verge of bankruptcy, so I’m guessing this hasn’t had quite the impact they had hoped for.

The will be other competitors—especially once e-books are freed from the stupidity of DRM—but for the time being, Amazon.com is way ahead of the curve. The Kindle may not be the coolest device in the world, but the integration with the site, and the ease of ordering has given them a huge advantage.

This is about more than the simple loss of physical spaces where you can buy books. For ages, booksellers have served as key recommenders within the book world. Getting a lot of booksellers behind a particular book is arguably as advantageous as good review coverage. (Although to really have an impact, you need both.)

Thanks to the chain stores, to rising costs of everything, to the erosion of America’s appreciation of the bookstore culture, most booksellers are now more clerk than recommender. And that’s only going to get worse as e-books become more popular. Even putting aside the possibility that a huge portion of bookstores will simply go out of business, how likely is it that you’ll go into a bookstore and talk with someone about books that you should check out when you can get automated recommendations on your cell phone that aggregate buying and reviewing habits of thousands of readers?

One of my overriding fears about the possibility of an e-book dominated world is that we’ll lose both the locations and the interest in getting together to talk about literature. Maybe we’ll be able to do that through an improved feedback loop via our digital devices, or maybe online reading groups will evolve into something that satisfies the desire to communicate about what you read, but I have my doubts. I think physical bookstores are a key to bringing people together and fostering communication. Which is why I think the mission of indie stores might shift over the next few years from a content provider to a community enhancer.

Getting back on track: the long tail model is very dependent on good recommending mechanisms. It’s one thing to have everything in the world available at your fingertips; it’s another to figure out which part of that jungle you want to inhabit. Savvy search engines are one obvious way of pushing people down the tail from blockbuster hit to more obscure masterpiece. But we need more than that. Book reviews serve this purpose, but relying upon traditional book reviews sources—magazines, newspapers, radio and TV—would result in recommendations of a very, very small number of titles in comparison to what’s out there.

That’s one of the motives for the litblog explosion. There are quite literally tens of thousands of books a year that fall through the proverbial cracks. Say what you will about the quality of online reviewing—at least there’s the potential to highlight a large number of titles within a particular niche that receive no mainstream book coverage. Those sorts of recommenders are necessary to give visibility to a lot of the titles that are published each year—especially if browsing through a store (where these titles probably wouldn’t be anyway) isn’t part of our cultural habits anymore.

It’s refreshing to see how many booksellers have started blogs over the past few years, and the ease of doing so, or of connecting on Facebook, is very encouraging. And this information decentralization is often heralded as one of the reasons why the e-future is so bright. In theory, the gatekeepers have been overthrown and there’s basically an unlimited number of recommenders recommending books from an unlimited number of authors to an unlimited number of readers. To some, this is a much more appealing model than the current one in which there are only so many books published, so many places where they are available, and so many people capable of reviewing them.

I’m going to get all Orwellian and paranoid for a moment here though: Douglas Rushkoff’s Life Inc. discusses how in our contemporary society—which is dominated by corporate thought and ever growing multinationals interested only in profit and not in life—people have become more and more disconnected from things. From neighborhoods, from their homes, from each other. All of this is much better said in Rushkoff’s book, but basically, by separating us from the things that would make up a healthy, humanistic life, we’ve become isolated, individual consumers that are easily tagged and targeted. Corporations would love to know exactly what you do with your time, what you buy, how you buy it, etc., to make the marketing process that much more specific and exacting. And in terms of books, e-readers help create the ultimate solitary book consumer.

From the slimy perspective of a marketing MBA, now that they’ve got you alone and can track your buying and browsing habits (which Amazon.com already does, and which leads to all of the personalized recommendations), you can be marketed to in a much more efficient and simplified manner. Right now, I get e-mails on occasion about books I might be interested in. And to be completely honest, I actually am interested in a good portion of these titles. And I do occasionally buy these books—but that requires either a visit to the store or a few mouseclicks and a five-day shipping wait. How much more spectacular would it be if I could read an ad that was pushed to my phone and then simply click one link and download the book instantaneously?

It’s possible that e-books can transform us from readers to book consumers. And in my opinion, that conversion will expedite the current chipping away at the literary book culture. The big publishers have deep pockets, and it’s very easy to imagine them finding a way to take advantage of this new distribution chain to be able to promote the most profitable titles directly into your pocket. Unless there’s massive differentiation and the entry costs for advertising/promoting are very low, the books being promoted through the system will be the massive best-sellers, and it’ll only be a matter of time before e-devices are just a handheld version of the front table at Barnes & Noble, where books are displayed not because of their editorial quality, but because of the marketing dollars behind them.

So I’m totally torn about the impact e-books might have on the publication and promotion of literature in translation. I’m all for anything (recommender, device, format) that gets more good books into the hands (and minds) of more readers, but I’m also very wary of this new direct distribution chain. If we lived in a world that operated on different values—diversity being more important than profit, intellectual stimulation as appreciated as efficient consumption—I wouldn’t be so worried. But a radical change like this could easy be manipulated by the corporations already in charge. Either way, then next few years will be very interesting . . .

Now we’re back to e-books: What’s quicker than right-fucking-now? That’s the number one promise of e-books. We tend to get distracted by the devices and our love of the physical book when we talk about the Kindle (or whatever e-reading device you want to talk about) and overlook the fact that this is a purchasing device first and a reading device second. Unless you’re as indecisive as I am and tend to carry three or four books on you at any point in time (and recent NEA studies on the reading habits of Americans points to the fact that the vast majority of us are not the sort who do things like that), the real advantage of the Kindle is that you can buy what you want RIGHTNOW. No walking over to a store, no browsing, no special orders, no shipping costs, no delayed gratification—if someone in the audience names a book, I can download it before I finish this paragraph and start reading before I sit down. That’s the American Dream. That’s the promise of the Internets fulfilled.

And that points in the direction of how literature in translation can be served in an e-book world. Now, I don’t want to bash traditional retail booksellers—I worked in indie bookstores for years and that’s where my heart is—but they face a very real set of constraints that tends not to favor literature in translation. Shelf space in a physical bookstore is very limited, and as a result, stores want to stock books that will sell—and sell steadily. And translations—like the imaginary Bulgarian book above that have almost no marketing effort behind it—tend not to sell all that steadily . . . And if this book is only going to sell one copy every year, why should a store tie up money and space in stocking it when it could use that space for a book on Zombies?

OK, so that’s a bit facetious and what not, but it’s true that there is a bottleneck problem at physical bookstores and the tendency (not uniform: just look at McNally Jackson, Skylight, City Lights, St. Mark’s, and many many other—at least 50!—top-notch independent stores for examples of how to curate an interesting book selection) is to overload on potential blockbusters at the expense of diversity.

A few years ago, Chris Anderson wrote an article for Wired about “The Long Tail.” (This was then expanded into a book by the same title.) The basic idea is that digital retailers aren’t bound by this same space problem. They can list tens of thousands of items that won’t fit in a physical store. Which is obvious. But what isn’t obvious is that all of these items sell. Not necessarily in huge quantities, but they all sell. No matter how many items are made available, there always seems to be at least a handful of people interested in purchasing every one. (For those interested in figures: approximately 25% of Amazon.com’s revenue is from titles not stocked in the largest of the largest Barnes & Noble stores. That’s significant.)

That’s the crux of the e-revolution for translations: Putting Amazon.com aside for the moment, right now, we’re publishing books and working our ass off to get them into a few hundred locations across the United States. If someone happens to walk into one of those stores, they might come across an Open Letter title, get intrigued, and buy it. What percentage of the reading population are we actually reaching? I have no real idea, but it’s nowhere near the number of people who carry cell phones . . .

So it’s now 2020. Every cell phone device in the world has e-book downloading and reading capabilities. It’s common to see every person on a train hunched over their electronic device, scrolling through the New York Times or reading Ulysses. Open Letter books are now available in e-versions to every single one of these people. That’s a huge increase in potential audience. And the distribution costs have shrunk considerably. Rather than paying an employee to call all these bookstores that have managed to lose the catalog, forgot about the appointment, or just can’t find it in the budget to stock Ricardas Gavelis’s Vilnius Poker, someone posts the e-versions to a few different locations and the magic happens. No more shipping. No more returns. Printing costs are much lower than they were before, because instead of printing 3,000 copies in order to sell 2,000, we’re printing 500 for the collectors and bookstores.

Or at least that’s the dream . . .

In this book utopia, all books are available to all customers—and instead of trying to market your titles through a series of middlemen, the most effective marketing would be directly with the reader. The person who reads an e-mail on their device, clicks a link, and has instantly bought your book . . .

To put a finer point on it: Under this scenario, an independent publisher can finally reach as large of an audience as possible for its works in translation. The bottleneck has been eliminated and distribution is no longer the primary problem. This would break Erroll McDonald’s analogy—whereas foreign films only show in a handful of theaters, literature in translation would be literally everywhere.

That’s not to say there aren’t problems—there definitely are, and I’ll get into those in a second. First I want to take a look at one other major improvement to global book culture that the prevalence of e-books could bring about.

When I was in Buenos Aires last year for an editors’ trip, I was astounded by how much books cost. Argentina’s not necessarily a wealthy country these days (again, thank you, multinational banks and the IMF) and a lot of the books for sale were way outside of my price range. The largest Spanish publishers in the world are located in Spain, and since most of the time they buy Spanish language rights for the world, they publish the books and then export them across the ocean to Argentina. Which costs a fortune, and limits the number of readers who have access to these titles. A horrible situation since Buenos Aires has traditionally been a very bookish city.

The situation in the Arab world is even worse though. With so many countries involved, all with different censorship laws and bookselling traditions, there’s really no way to distribute titles outside of the city/country where they’re published. To get a book from a Lebanese publisher to a reader in Morocco is a) extremely expensive and b) virtually impossible.

The e-book utopia described above could solve a lot of these problems. Simply eliminating all the shipping costs would make a book published in Spain affordable to most ��ǰ��ٱ�ñ�Dz�. And to be able to download a book from Cairo while living in Iraq solves a host of problems on that front as well. The main idea is that digital is also global. Put this together with the long tail dictum that increased access equals increased readership and our global book culture stands to gain quite a bit from the advent of an e-reading world.

But wait! But wait! I said I was a bit ambiguous about e-books and here’s where the other shoe drops . . .

Let me back up a bit to give a broader context for how e-books hold some promise to revolutionize the business of publishing literature in translation. Most likely you’re already familiar with the dismal statistics about the publication of literature in translation in my country. According to a number of studies from the past half-dozen years, approximately 3% of all books published in the U.S. have been translated into English. And to be honest, that number is probably a bit of an exaggeration.

A couple years ago, I started a Translation Database on our blog/review site Three Percent. Because all of the “studies” of translation production in the United States were simply numbers—no details of which books were included, where they came from, who published them—I thought it would be useful to create a database to track all the original works of fiction and poetry that came out in translation. So starting in January of 2008, I started reviewing hundreds of catalogs and websites, getting in touch with translators, associations, foreign governments and the like. For the sake of my sanity (which, granted, is already a bit suspect), I did put some limits on this: I only collected info on adult books that had never before been translated into English. So, no picture books and no tenth retranslation of Kafka’s Amerika made it onto my list. By themselves, the numbers are a bit staggering, or, well, to put it more accurately, depressing.

According to this database, in 2008 only 362 original translations were published in America. And in 2009 that number has dipped to 326. (Thank you, multinational banks and your corrupt money-making schemes.) This number is so low that I can envision a retired somebody being able to read all of these books over the course of a year.

I can’t bring myself to believe that there are only 350-or-so titles from around the world that are worthy of publication in any given year. From my last visit to Iceland, I came back with at least a dozen really promising recommendations that (with unlimited resources) I’d love to publish. But in 2008 and 2009 a grand total of 6 Icelandic books were published in the United States. (Several of which are mystery novels. I’m not saying, just pointing out.)

Whenever I visit another country and talk about the state of translations in America, people wonder why it is that we’re so fucking provincial. Why don’t we simply publish more literature in translation? Is it because editors don’t read Icelandic? Are we just stupid? Should Icelandic authors try and write more like Stephanie Meyer?

Well, it’s kind of all of those things and none of them. On a very simple level, it’s all about money. Or money and perceived audiences and the long tail concept. Here’s a brief anecdote: This past summer I was on a panel at BookExpo America with Errol McDonald, a famous editor at Pantheon Books who, once upon a time, brought out a few volumes of Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt quintet. (After Schiffrin was forced out of Pantheon, McDonald wrote a famous smackdown op-ed piece for the Times about how publishers are entitled to make money and that Schiffrin loyalists were pathetic in their “support of the welfare mentatlity.”)

Nowadays, McDonald’s not much of a foreign lit supporter. Aside from falsely claiming that there’s no press in America that can survive publishing only literature in translation (cough, Open Letter, cough, Archipelago Books, cough), he also made the grand, and very telling, statement that a corporate publisher like Pantheon views literature in translation like foreign movies—the work may be high quality, but there’s just not an audience for it. At least not a large enough one to make it worthwhile to spend tens of thousands of dollars to have a book translated, published, and promoted.

This is a perfect example of the vicious self-fulfilling cycle of economic censorship at work. Sure, there is an additional cost to publishing a book originally written in another language. But that said, in contrast to advances paid to American authors, the amounts publishers offer for foreign works are a dime on the dollar. (With a few notable exceptions, like The Kindly Ones, and a handful of megastar authors.) But, in a way, not spending enough money is part of the problem. Here’s the typical progression of a work of literature in translation at a corporate publishing house (like Pantheon): an editor falls in love with Bulgarian book X and recommends it to the publisher; publisher agrees reluctantly, but only if they offer a low advance because the book is “risky” (ALL BOOKS ARE RISKY); with such a low advance the marketing, sales, and publicity departments assume this book isn’t “important,” or at least not as important as book Y, which they paid $2.5 million for; so this Bulgarian novel gets little love from the promotions area of the publishing house, only advancing a few hundred copies into a couple hundred bookstores across the country, getting very little push with the media, and, as a result—in spite of some booksellers absolutely loving the novel—sells pretty poorly; thus, the publisher’s hesitation about “those international books” is confirmed.

The situation would be different if we lived in a culture that valued long-term sales growth and editorial quality over quick hits and blockbusters. But that’s an issue for a different speech.

This whole long digression—and trust me, we’re working our way back to the e-book promised land—is to illustrate why it is that small, independent, and university presses are the ones doing the bulk of literature in translation. According to my database, over the past two years, the big corporate publishers have brought out fewer than 20% of all the fiction and poetry translations published in the U.S.

And unlike those big presses, these indie, small, university presses (I’ll just call them independent presses from now on to make things easier) don’t have the same level of sales representation, or the same sort of supply relationships with the various bookstores in the U.S. (Another topic for another speech: why bookstores all over the country all tend to look the same, with similar piles of similarly shitty books.) This is—to the ire of independent bookstores everywhere—why indie presses tend to love Amazon.com. Sure, Amazon.com tries to screw you discount-wise, but at least the books are available and everyone in America (and the UK and Canada) can order are receive the books easily and in a short period of time.

It’s amazing how much physical ink has been spilled in talking about e-books. I’m just guessing here, but by my estimates, reporters/publishers/authors/booksellers spend approximately 5 hours discussing the e-books and e-book devices for every single e-book that’s actually sold. And I’m only kind of joking. According to an Associated Press article from August 14th, e-sales account for approx. 2% of total book sales. An ironic figure given the subject of my speech and the fact that translations account for less than 3% of all books produced . . . yet result in far less media coverage.

But there are good reasons for that. E-books and graphic novels (which, at least at this point in time seem perfectly incompatible) are two of the fastest growing segments of a pretty slumpy book market. Beyond this rapid growth—and of course it’s rapid, it’s gone from zero to something in a mere year-and-a-half—there’s something about e-books that captures the imagination and out-strips any of the advantages or flaws found in the Kindle or Sony eReader or iPhone. In every other medium, digital has proven to be the future, and as books move in this direction, everyone is collectively freaking out.

And I mean that in the most polarizing of ways. E-books and the future of reading tends to be a very divisive topic, with bibliophiles lamenting the loss of that book smell, with geeks panting over the possibility of an iBook reader, with bookstores watching their ever shrinking margins continue to erode, with publishers and the Authors Guild locking into an outdated DRM-model and fretting over the quickly-becoming-standard $9.99 retail price, and with authors nervously trolling Scribd to see if anyone is illegally stealing their work. (Although it may be worse if no one is thieving your work—we all want to write something worthy of piracy, no?)

As you’ll see below, I’m internally divided as to whether or not the e-book revolution will good for book culture or not. (The first time I saw an ad for Kindle accessories in the NYC subway, I had visions of the apocalypse. And yes, I am one of those weirdos who’s annoyed by the fact that I can’t see what book people are reading on their Kindles. I love having the opportunity to make snap judgments about people based on what they read in public. And, to be honest, my dream is to see someone reading an Open Letter book on the subway—a dream that will go unfulfilled if the Kindle takes over the world.) But there are at least a couple of distinct advantages offered by e-books that are worth looking at—especially in relation to distribution.

Before getting into all this though, I do want to state upfront that I’m going to indulge in a bit of science fiction in this speech and imagine a more ideal e-book market with different e-readers than exist today. So forget the Kindle and its DRM issues and shitty page-turning buttons for a few minutes and imagine a world in which everyone’s adopted an open e-book format that works on any number of gizmos from fancy full-color enabled e-readers to the most basic of cellphones. Scripts are no longer a problem, and e-books are available in Arabic, Japanese, etc., etc. And almost everything published can be purchased wirelessly from either a digital retailer or directly from the publisher. Bookstores? We’ll get to them in a minute.

One of the great possibilities of the e-revolution is the belief that by eliminating a lot of middlemen, authors/publishers will be able to reach readers directly—check that, they’ll be able to reach far more readers directly than they currently do. This may be different in other countries—I can really only speak for the U.S. and to a lesser degree for the UK—but distribution is one of the biggest problems non-corporate publishers struggle with. It sucks to know you’re publishing one of the greatest books of the twentieth century—for the sake of argument, let’s use Ilf & Petrov’s classic The Golden Calf as an example—and to only be able to get it into 100 Barnes & Noble stores across the country.