Books Galore

Charles Paul Freund from the March 1999 issue

Not enough books to choose among? Could be. Book superstores such as Borders may have 150,000 titles and online sources such as Amazon.com claim to offer a million in-print books. But nearly all these titles share one limiting factor: They're in print from American publishers. Readers in search of books published overseas have a hard time getting them, and their usual solutions (like asking globe-trotting friends to bring books back for them) haven't changed much since Guten-berg.The Internet, however, is upgrading that tradition. Barnes & Noble has teamed up with Bertelsmann A.G., the German book conglomerate; they plan to offer books in a variety of languages via Barnesandnoble.com. A spokes-man for the venture told The New York Times that customers eventually would be able to order almost "any book on the planet." Bertels-mann also plans its own Europe-based multilingual book site.

In the meantime, Amazon.com has already established two comprehensive sites offering hundreds of thousands of titles: Amazon.co.uk for British works and, on Bertelsmann's turf, Amazon.de for German books (Klicken Sie Hier!). Of course, the Internet has long been teeming with specialized foreign book sites, from a site selling New Zealand's 619 local books in print to one run by an association of Dutch second-hand dealers.

These developments are of significance well beyond the polyglot bookworm community. Old-line gatekeepers may be bemoaning a purported wilting in book culture, as major publishers and critics from Manhattan to Milan lose their prestige and power. Meanwhile, a largely unremarked revolution in cultural opportunity continues. Technology, far from supplanting reading culture, is reinvigorating it: Authors and publishers are able to reach ever more diverse markets, while the choice available to readers grows ever larger. Now it's global, and available to them with a single click.