Why Aren't eBooks Global?

Joshua Bodwell writes in the current issue of Poets & Writers magazine about book lists ("You Are What You Read"). He calls the list of some of the books he read last year "Bodwell's Baker's Dozen". As translators we not only read for pleasure, but also to keep current on terminology and usage in the languages in which we work. As freelancers we also run our own businesses and may read up on business advice. All of this, then, should lead to a fairly eclectic reading list for most of us. Last year, mine included:

• Global Communication by Thomas McPhail
• The Social Media Survival Guide by Deltina Hay
• Till Eulenspiegel by Christa and Gerhard Wolf (German)
• The Entrepreneurial Linguist by Judy and Dagmar Jenner
• Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar edited by Richard Ford
• New Stories by Southern Women edited by Mary Ellis Gibson
• Los Mejores Narradores Jóvenes en Español from Granta en Español (Spanish)

Unfortunately, unless I am willing to pay outrageous shipping charges, I find it rather difficult to get a reasonable selection of physical books in German here in the U.S. The main branches of both the Brooklyn and Manhattan library systems do have German-language sections, but their holdings tend to be rather mixed, including quite a number of German translations of American books, and mostly relatively old. Bookstores carry, at best, annotated bilingual collections of short stories for students who are learning German.

Enter eBooks -- or so I thought. Just like the Internet finally let me read foreign newspapers without spending a fortune (and waiting 2 weeks for an issue to arrive), I thought I would now be able to download German-language books. But when I went to Amazon Germany, I found that I cannot download books from them to a Kindle registered with a U.S. address. So much for digital media as a means to access content from around the world ...

Catching Up on My Reading

I found out today that the main Brooklyn Public Library's foreign language section just closed for renovations until mid-June. I guess that gives me time to catch up on the books I did take out, but didn't have time to read yet. So here are some books I recently read and found helpful (not all were from the library):

Make Your Contacts Count: Networking Know-How for Cash, Clients, and Career Success by Anne Baber and Lynne Waymon. Not all of their advice is applicable to one-person businesses selling a business-to-business service, such as translators, but there is useful advice, including how to best network at conferences and how to plan for networking events.

Los Mejores Narradores Jóvenes en Español from Granta. A collection of Spanish-language short stories, not necessarily easy, but good for brushing up my Spanish. As with all short story collections, some are more my taste than others (and a couple I just didn't finish).

The New Media Monopoly by Ben Bagdikian. I read a (much) earlier edition of this book back in college when I majored in Media Studies. It's quite interesting to see what has (and -- even more interesting -- what hasn't) changed since then.

I also enjoy reading Wired magazine -- as does the rest of my family, so we have to negotiate who gets to read it first. The May issue is devoted to exploring humor -- what makes us laugh and why. Did you know there is actually an academic field of "humor studies", complete with an International Society for Humor Studies? Now, I think that is funny in itself.

So what are you reading?

PS: The Science and Technology Division of the American Translators Association just published a post I wrote for the the divison's blog. It's about The Society for Technical Communication (STC).

Happy holidays to those of you who celebrate Easter or Passover!