The New York Times alerts us to a potential crisis in foreign rights management. They claim that English-Language Books Are Filling Europe’s Stores. Paywall? This may be an accessible alternative.

The evidence they cite comes mainly from the Netherlands: “Booksellers in the Netherlands said that many young people prefer to buy books in English with their original covers, even if Dutch is their first language, because those are the books they see and want to post about on BookTok. . . . In some bookstores in Amsterdam, young adult sections carry mostly English-language books, with only a handful of Dutch options.” One bookseller, Leon Verschoor of Martyrdom in Amsterdam is quoted as saying of his young customers “they’ll never read in Dutch”.

Further evidence for the Englification of Europe is provided by Jennifer Egan who reported that when she was in a Dutch bookshop signing copies of The Candy House a couple of years ago, she noticed that most of the books she was signing were the English edition. Her Dutch publisher, De Arbeiderspers, confirms her suspicions: they claim that around 65% of Netherlands sales for the book were in English. Now of course it is possible that De Arbeiderspers is exaggerating because they don’t really know. They are after all the publisher of the Dutch translation and just the Dutch translation. The English language original was published in 2022 by Scribner’s, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, and one might not expect them to be telling the Dutch publisher exactly how many copies had been sold in this or that market. No doubt a few booksellers might anecdotally have shared their opinions with the publisher, but firm numbers can’t really come into it — though I suppose the publisher may have sold fewer copies of their Dutch translation than they had expected.

Now, if you are a Dutch publisher, this sort of trend, if real, represents a serious threat. It’s not much of a business model if having paid a premium to sign translation rights for a book by a bestselling author, you find after you’ve translated it that nobody wants anything but the original English version. Find yourself thus positioned more than once and you might be forgiven for refusing to buy any translation rights next time Frankfurt comes around. The article carries reactions from a couple of German publishers who’s take on it all is a sort of “well if that happens it’ll be a problem” rather than “Yes we’d noticed that too”. My suspicion is that this is a sort of storm in a teacup story, but I suppose it could become a problem that a world language, English, really does become the world language, and everybody everywhere becomes fluent.

The potential damage is double edged. European language publishers, like all publishers, want to grow. I have a suspicion that the only publishing community which has access to more manuscript that it can handle is the English-language publishing community. If you are a French, German, Dutch, Swedish, Czech language publisher, in order to keep your title count up to a level where sales have a chance of exceeding your costs you have no alternative but to publish lots of translations. English language books thus represent a huge opportunity — and if your readers just want the original, well, you’re scuppered. Sure you can publish translations from all the other languages, but many world bestsellers do tend to start out in English don’t they?

From the other end of the telescope English language publishers and agents would face difficulties in selling translation rights in their books. This in turn hits the authors, because while they would be happy to get a royalty for all the extra English language copies sold in European countries, they wouldn’t be getting those advances to which they have become accustomed.

I have previously suggested that given the logistical changes in the book business territorial rights might become a dead letter. Maybe the original publisher should aim to sell copies anywhere. If a translation into Tagalog is called for, maybe the original publisher could do that. This makes things tidier, but still doesn’t cure the foreign-language publishers volume problem. Maybe De Arbeiderspers could be negotiating for the English-language rights in the Netherlands, in Europe? Luckily I suspect it will in fact be a long time before people in the Netherlands lose the ability and desire to read in Dutch, so The Times’s red flag can be stowed away.