Le Monde Diplomatique har en bra artikelsom visar hur koncentrerad dagens bokindustri är på den nordamerikanska engelskspråkiga marknaden.
Of the 14,000 books published in Britain each year (twice as many as in France), only 3% are translations. The US manages only 2.8% (1). And selling the US rights to a book, always cheaply, perhaps for just a few hundred dollars, does not guarantee that it will be marketed. Publishing and bookselling have become highly concentrated and demand ever more immediate returns. This has transformed the status of books, which are now thought of as just another product to be submitted to the norms of industrial management and financial profitability.
och Le Monde fortsätter:
Megastores and internet retail services of three big chains - Barnes & Noble, Borders and Book-a-Million - have gradually displaced independent bookshops. With a combined turnover of $8bn, these chains exercise huge power over publishers by refusing to stock books they don’t believe will sell enough, charging for prominence in their windows and in-store displays, and returning works that don’t sell quickly enough or receive insufficient media attention.
Other than a few university publishing houses and the American Book Association’s network of 1,200 independent bookshops, there is little room on the shelves of the US for slow sellers or foreign books. And foreign books are undesirable because of the costs of translation and the unfeasibly expensive promotional campaigns they would need. This has led some publishers to market translations without crediting the translator in order to pass them off at retailers as domestic works.
Den som är intresserad av intellektuell historia kan jämföra detta med Antonio Gramscis hegemonikoncept
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