How Amazon Quietly Became America's Biggest Publisher of Translated Literature

Last week, on the eve of the Frankfurt Book Fair, the largest and oldest in the world (it dates back to the fifteenth century), AmazonCrossing, Amazon Publishing’s translation imprint, announced it would be committing $10 million over the next five years to publishing more works in translation. “We launched AmazonCrossing five years ago to introduce readers to voices of the world through English-language translations of foreign-language books,” AmazonCrossing’s publisher Sarah Jane Gunter said in a statement. “While we are now one of the largest publishers of translated literature in the United States, translated fiction is still a tiny fraction of new publications.”