Last week Amazon.co.uk launched its new ‘literature in translation’ store. It’s very difficult to find the store when browsing through Amazon’s website, but here’s a direct link to it: http://tinyurl.com/5kbue3
This is the blurb from the site:
Welcome to our
Literature in Translation store. Browse here for great deals on top fiction from around the globe. You can search by language or by genre to discover new authors, and see what other people are reading and rating.
Despite the slightly muted introduction of this new feature, I’m really pleased to see a large outfit such as Amazon allocating special space to translated literature, and shining the spotlight on non-Anglophone writers, particularly given that currently only 2% of the books on our bookshops’ shelves are translations from another language.
Kudos to The Bookseller.com for reporting this news.