Hi Anton,

I don't believe the Russian language editions (published in the early 90s) were 
ever offered in an ebook version.  No, you can't have my copies :)

You're seeing the same problem that back catalog in English is having -- It 
costs money to set a book for eBook editions -- basically these books existed 
prior to wide-spread use of word-processors, and so they don't even exist in a 
standard electronic form.  The question is who pays to have it retyped, 
proofed, corrected, and then emitted in each eReader format (ebook, pdf, 
whatever Amazon uses, whatever Nook uses, etc) and validated on a reasonable 
set of eReaders for that kind.

The publisher isn't going to see sufficient revenue unless they have a built-in 
market, and the foreign language editions don't really.  And large publishers 
are all "I have the rights! The rights are mine! I paid for them! and we aren't 
publishing an eMarket version because there isn't enough profit in it!  AND NO, 
YOU CAN'T HAVE THE RIGHTS even though you, as a small company with a specific 
targeted niche, might see enough profit /for your company/ to make it 
worthwhile!"

You could make the case that the Spanish market is big enough, given its 
ranking in the world table for number of native/additional speakers of it… but 
how many of those speakers are in Western markets and have access to an 
eReader?  :/

You're only hope really is for Ray to sell the rights to a blockbuster movie, 
the producers don't screw it up, and it brings new readers to the table, in 
sufficient numbers to get the major rights-holding publishers to go through 
that effort when they republish it in order to capitalize on the hype.

The above is all my opinion.  You are welcome to shrug it off as "blathering of 
an idiot".

rip


On Sep 22, 2013, at 12:42 PM, Anton Melser <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I am living in France and have read both The Riftwar Saga and The Empire 
> Trilogy in French. Reading novels is pretty much the only way to get any 
> maturity in a language (yes, I have a linguistics degree!) and I'd like to 
> read some of the other series in either Spanish or Russian. Spencer mentioned 
> in a recent post that his son's English reading started improving rapidly 
> once he found novels he liked and foreign language reading is no different! 
> 
> Amazon France has been fine for getting the ebooks in French but nothing 
> turned up for Spanish and there is no such thing as Amazon Russia...
> 
> Does anyone know where I could purchase such ebooks? Do they even exist? 
> Might they soon? I guess I could go paper but since starting to use an 
> ereader I have zero desire to go back... 
> 
> Thanks,
> Anton



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