erinja:I think they're referring to their book service alone, not all of the book services in Esperanto. They couldn't possibly have the statistics for other book services, so I am sure that they're only speaking for themselves.

Actually they were quoting figures from the UEA. But yeah, that's still just one organization.

The bottom line is that the same market forces rule Esperanto as anything else. If I write a book on the history of Washington DC, in English, what percentage of English speakers do you think will be interested enough in the topic to pay money for my book? Now translate this to Esperanto - with a much smaller number of speakers, and a book that will probably cost around twice as much, it's unlikely that I could sell a thousand copies.

I understand what you're saying on that. I suppose the topics would need to be more general and be focused more on topics that would appeal to anyone from anywhere.

So while a book on the history of Washington DC may not have widespread appeal, I would think that a book on some unique figure or event that tells an interesting story would be worth printing.

Here are a few historical books picked from my collection that I think would appeal to a wide range of people if translated:

http://tinyurl.com/chghxxj
http://tinyurl.com/d76a8pc
http://tinyurl.com/cx4m6ar
http://tinyurl.com/cmjybks
http://tinyurl.com/cnsyadq

I guess you could make the argument that, with the exception of one, the list is somewhat Eurocentric. But my understanding is that the majority of Esperantists can trace their lineage to Europe in some way. And I would also expect Esperantists to be more interested than the usual person in events and ideas that originated beyond the borders of their own nations.

erinja:If you have the interest and the financial resources to support the Esperanto community by buying lots of books, then that's great! But most Esperanto speakers don't have the money to spend, or the inclination to buy a lot of books that might not even interest them, to invest in that manner.

Well if I'm going to learn this language then I kind of want to actually do something with it and reading is one of the best ways to learn. But I read quite a bit anyway.

I will probably buy one to two books in Esperanto a month. I'm a pretty slow reader so that should be enough.

Alright, some of you raise some fair points. In a nutshell:

• Esperanto books tend to be more expensive than non-Esperanto equivalents, sometimes significantly so. This is call being priced out of market.
  
• Esperanto language works tend to sell slowly in comparison to works in national languages.
  
• There are often fewer options with respect to available material.

So, here are my thoughts:

Yes, Esperanto books tend to be more expensive and less available than national language books. This is in all probability due to shorter production runs and attempts by the publisher and author to achieve some level of profitability, however minuscule.

However, that dynamic applies principally to traditional publishing models. Print on Demand (POD) works differently. I think if more Esperanto authors sought out quality print on demand solutions they'd have much better luck with Esperanto books of the dead tree variety. Also, with the rise of both free and pay ebooks things get even more interesting. Being purely electronic in nature, overhead is tiny and effectively fixed. As such, the first few ebook sales cover the fixed costs and all subsequent sales are, in effect, pure profit for a given revenue cycle.

Print on demand and ebook publishing eliminate the burden of slow sales as a barrier to profitability; as long as some sales actually occur. Further, there will always be more material available in major national languages than in Esperanto. So, it can't win if it plays by those rules. However, if high quality works are produced, people will buy them, period. Second, if translations of works are made available in Esperanto before they're available languages it can win. Because, this creates an incentive to learn Esperanto that did not exist before, and this opens works up to new audiences that creators of works could not have otherwise reached.

So, I think Esperanto language works are entirely viable, just not with traditional models. Which is fine, because a lot of traditional models are finding themselves obsolete; just ask the news paper types.

SPX:I don't think it's survival 300 years from now is exactly guaranteed.

Maybe not, but it's not a topic that I really spend any time thinking about, to be completely honest, and though I've been involved with Esperanto for quite some time now, its survival a hundred years or more from now isn't a topic that has come up in conversation.

I do think you overstate the power of the romantic ideal. People learn Esperanto for all kinds of reasons, many of which don't relate to a romantic ideal. I learned Esperanto because I heard it was easy. I talked recently to a very well-known Esperantist who also learned because he heard it was easy.

You come for whatever reason, and you stay for the community and the friendships that you form, which still doesn't really relate to the romantic idea, because any sort of community (religious group, political action group, community volunteering group) can lead to a similar feeling of friendship between people who haven't met before.

Esperanto probably won't get you out of a bind in a foreign country, but it provides a ready-made community of people willing to do things for one another, if you keep track of your foreign contacts and you do a little networking. I've hosted Esperanto speakers at my apartment on short notice when they needed a place to stay, and I've stayed at the homes of many Esperanto speakers abroad. Esperanto has an extremely strong culture of hospitality.

From what I can tell there aren't a lot of books to buy. At least not a lot of new ones.

It's about 150-200 books per year, if you count small booklets as books, and if you also count books about Esperanto (the statistics don't break that out).
There are some detailed numbers about that at Sezonoj.

You have to remember that there's no such thing as an Esperanto Amazon.com where you can find practically anything. No one book service has everything, so sometimes you need to look at multiple foreign book services to find what you're looking for.

If you join the UEA, their magazine Esperanto usually has a page with a list of recently published books. That would be good to keep an eye on if you're interested in new stuff.

eojeff:
Print on demand and ebook publishing eliminate the burden of slow sales as a barrier to profitability; as long as some sales actually occur. Further, there will always be more material available in major national languages than in Esperanto. So, it can't win if it plays by those rules. However, if high quality works are produced, people will buy them, period. Second, if translations of works are made available in Esperanto before they're available languages it can win. Because, this creates an incentive to learn Esperanto that did not exist before, and this opens works up to new audiences that creators of works could not have otherwise reached.

I agree with you in part. Yes, POD and electronic formats overcome a lot of the limitations of the traditional publishing model. But let me point out a couple of concerns:

1. If we're talking about POD in the sense of writers publishing their own works, then as erinja alluded to earlier, quality control is going to be a problem. Certainly a self-published work can be of excellent quality. But without the safeguard of a competent editor, quite a bit of them (probably most of them) will not be. If, on the other hand, otherwise traditional publishing houses start utilizing this technology then that could be a good thing.

2. eBooks are cool and all--and I will take it over nothing--but there is nothing like actually holding a nicely bound book in your hand. I guess that mildly speaking I'm a biblophile. I like books. I own a lot of them. I like the feel and the smell. And I like to admire good cover art. So I will be very sad if electronic formats one day eclipse the real thing.

I think what might be a good idea would be to go to a POD + PDF model. Where you have the option to order a real book or, for a reduced price, go with an electronic version.

This is talked about a little bit here:

http://www.esperanto-usa.org/en/node/1391

Make sure to read the comments, in particular the big one by Tim Westover near the bottom.

eojeff:. . . because a lot of traditional models are finding themselves obsolete; just ask the news paper types.

Well it's a little complicated. Daily newspapers are definitely dying a slow death. But readership for weekly newspapers, believe it or not, is actually going up. And there are also a ton of magazines available on just about any subject you can imagine with more and more being regularly introduced.

Personally, if/when I get to the point of being able to write competently in Esperanto, I would like to sell the domestic and almost all of the foreign language rights to a good publisher, but hold onto the Esperanto rights so that I could either resell them to a good Esperanto publisher or publish the Esperanto version myself. Because you know a conventional publisher would never publish an Esperanto edition.

erinja:
Maybe not, but it's not a topic that I really spend any time thinking about, to be completely honest, and though I've been involved with Esperanto for quite some time now, its survival a hundred years or more from now isn't a topic that has come up in conversation.

Really? That's strange to me. Over the past year that I've really been aware of Esperanto I've thought about it quite a bit. I guess it's important to me that Zamenhof's dream stays alive in some way, not just now but on into the future.

Isn't that the underlying concept behind Esperanto: to be a universally adopted international language? I have no idea if that will ever happen. But it definitely won't happen if it's allowed to die.

erinja:I do think you overstate the power of the romantic ideal. People learn Esperanto for all kinds of reasons, many of which don't relate to a romantic ideal. I learned Esperanto because I heard it was easy. I talked recently to a very well-known Esperantist who also learned because he heard it was easy.

I see. It seems that most people that I've talked to who are involved with the language believe strongly in its ability to foster understanding and help facilitate peace throughout the world.

erinja:You have to remember that there's no such thing as an Esperanto Amazon.com where you can find practically anything. No one book service has everything, so sometimes you need to look at multiple foreign book services to find what you're looking for.

Can you point me in the direction of some of these foreign book services?

erinja:If you join the UEA, their magazine Esperanto usually has a page with a list of recently published books. That would be good to keep an eye on if you're interested in new stuff.

Thanks for the heads up. I have in fact intended to join the UEA.

I should also point out... even if Esperanto "dies" within 300 years. Understand, because it's a well documented planned language, it can be resurrected by a completely new speaker-base at any time. There is historical precedent for this, both small and great.

• Small Example: There are Ido and Volapük editions of Wikipedia.
  
• Medium Example: There is a movement afoot to revive Yiddish. There are few native speakers left, most died in the Shoah (Holocaust) and those who did not often did not transmit a fluent grasp of the language to their children. I should note that there is a Yiddish edition of Wikipedia too. Though, I kind of wonder who uses it as the vast majority of modern Yiddish speakers are Orthodox Jews; many (but not all) of whom shun television and the Internet. (For the record, that's not a cheap shot at the Orthodox, just an observation.)
  
• Big Example: Modern Hebrew. The Hebrew language was generally considered dead outside of religious contexts. Though it continued to be used in religious contexts, its use in profane (secular non-religious) contexts was often forbidden. Yet, now it is a living language used in secular contexts all the time. Its modernization occurred through organized planning.

Therefore, I do not fear Esperanto vanishing from the world stage any time soon.

SPX:Because you know a conventional publisher would never publish an Esperanto edition.

Indeed.

A good example is that of the first Harry Potter book. Someone actually did an Esperanto translation, THEN asked for permission to distribute it (from a practical standpoint, a very risky move). Sometimes when you take a risk, you lose. And they did. Permission denied.

Permission was denied for distribution (of any sort - sale, free, printed, electronic, whathaveyou), but the publisher didn't want to publish it themselves, either, nor were they going to produce an Esperanto translation of their own. So... that project was killed about as dead as dead gets. No Esperanto translation of the Harry Potter books is publicly available, nor will even the currently existing translation likely ever be made publicly available (can't really say "never", though - the future is a very long time).

Personally, if I were the publisher, I would have said "whatever; go ahead". Because the market would have been tiny and its distribution wouldn't have impacted their sales one iota. But I'm not the publisher, and I'm sure they had solid reasons for the position they took. Even if I think the result is kind of silly. (And kind of too bad, too - I mean, that book is hellaciously long; translating it would have been quite an effort, which was, unfortunately, wasted.)

eojeff:I should also point out... even if Esperanto "dies" within 300 years. Understand, because it's a well documented planned language, it can be resurrected by a completely new speaker-base at any time. There is historical precedent for this, both small and great.

. . .

Therefore, I do not fear Esperanto vanishing from the world stage any time soon.

Interesting post and a good point. I suppose in that sense Esperanto will always exist.

Right now though, at least in comparison to other constructed languages, Esperanto is a massive success. It would be terrible if it got to the point to where there were only 200 speakers in the world.

RiotNrrd:
Indeed.

A good example is that of the first Harry Potter book. Someone actually did an Esperanto translation, THEN asked for permission to distribute it (from a practical standpoint, a very risky move). Sometimes when you take a risk, you lose. And they did. Permission denied.

. . .

Wow. Very interesting story. I wonder how long that translation took.

I could just about guarantee that any serious publisher would never agree to that if only because there was no way of knowing how good and accurate the translation was. I guess in that sense I actually kind of sympathize with the publisher.

But that does suck for the translator, who I'm sure did a good job. He/She should've just put it out in a PDF as Anonymous. But I dunno, maybe they were hoping their translation would get picked up, and an official Esperanto edition would get published, and they would get paid.

If I did have a book that an English publisher was interested in, I doubt I'd have to fight too hard to retain the Esperanto rights. It would be a very small concession.

Well, provided that we don't continue to have an endless chain of "Mickey Mouse Protection Acts" result in de facto perpetual copyrights in the United States, the copyright will eventually expire for the Harry Potter series. At that point, anyone can make a translation into any target language. Sadly, as things currently stand, that's something like 95 years from now. I say de facto, because the US Constitution expressly forbids perpetual copyrights.