European Bookstores Brimming With English
AMSTERDAM — When the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan was in the Netherlands a few years ago promoting her most recent novel, “The Candy House,” most of the people who asked her to sign books were not presenting her with copies in Dutch.
“The majority of the books I was selling were in English,” Ms. Egan said. According to her Dutch publisher, De Arbeiderspers, about 65 percent of sales for “The Candy House” in the Netherlands were in English.
As English fluency has increased in Europe, more readers have started buying American and British books in the original language, forgoing the translated versions published locally. This is especially true in Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands and, increasingly, Germany.
Publishers in those countries, as well as agents in the United States and Britain, worry this could undercut the market for translated books, meaning less money for authors and fewer opportunities for them to publish in Europe.
“Now there is a tipping point where things could really collapse,” said Tom Kraushaar, publisher at Klett-Cotta in Germany.
The English-language books that are selling in Europe are generally cheap paperbacks, printed by American and British publishers as export editions. Those versions are much less expensive than the same books in translation, which have to observe minimum pricing in countries like Germany.
English sales have accelerated in part because books now go viral on social media, especially TikTok. Booksellers in the Netherlands said many young people prefer to buy books in English with their original covers, even if Dutch is their first language, because those are the books they see and want to post about on BookTok.
To combat the English-language appeal of TikTok, some Dutch publishers have started to release translated books under their English titles, with covers that are similar, or the same, as the original designs.
Simon Dikker Hupkes, a commissioning editor at the Dutch publisher Atlas Contact, said the fact that many readers overlook the Dutch translations “hurts our hearts a little.”
Bookstores in the Netherlands have been buying more English versions of popular books or focusing on English editions of young adult novels.
“We neglect our language,” said Peter Hoomans, a seller at Scheltema, a bookstore in Amsterdam.
Some booksellers said they were pleased that people were buying books, regardless of the language. Jan Peter Prenger, the chief buyer at Libris, a large group of independent bookstores in the Netherlands, said that for the first time since the 1960s, 15-year-olds are back in bookstores in droves.
“That’s gold,” he said.