America's Biggest Publisher of Literature In Translation is Amazon | The New Republic

Over the past five years, only Dalkey Archive, the uber-literary small press that has published books by authors like Carlos Fuentes, Viktor Shklovsky, and Danilo Ki%u0161, has published more works in translation than AmazonCrossing. This year, AmazonCrossing plans to publish "77 titles from 15 countries and 12 languages" in the United States, which will almost certainly dwarf the output of Dalkey and its ilk. And, with this new $10 million commitment, the number of works in translation published by AmazonCrossing should continue to soar. Which means that AmazonCrossing will almost certainly be the largest publisher of translated literature in the United States for at least the next five years. Of course, $10 million over five years for works in translation is not a world-shaking announcement - after all, Simon & Schuster just gave comedian Amy Schumer close to that amount for just one book. And, while AmazonCrossing did announce a few interesting tweaks to its operations (more on those in a moment), it is mostly committing to continuing to do what works, just on a slightly grander scale. Still, though $10 million over five years will not turn AmazonCrossing into a publishing powerhouse, it still has important implications for translators and for readers.