Amazon Refuses to Publish Cornish-Language Ebook

[Steerpike]

Dangers of heavy conglomeration of market power in a single entity:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/2...to-publish-first-cornish-language-ebook.shtml

 

[Meyer]

I can't really bash Amazon for doing this when less than 5,000 people can actually speak the language.

 

[Steerpike]

I can't really bash Amazon for doing this when less than 5,000 people can actually speak the language.

That shouldn't make much of a difference. Amazon, through their Kindle Publishing Platform, publishes all kinds of books that way less than 5000 people will ever buy. In the grand scheme of things, what does it really cost them to have a Cornish language book available for download?

 

[Penpilot]

If Amazon kindle can have Hamlet written in Klingon, why can't they have this?

 

[Mindfire]

Why exactly is it important for Amazon to promote an "endangered" language? Maybe they just didn't feel it was worth their time. Can someone give me a compelling reason why Cornish should be preserved? I mean, no one sheds tears over Latin or Ancient Egyptian. That particular ethnic group will always have their place in history whether someone speaks their language or not.

 

[Chilari]

Language should be preserved because it's about culture and community and a link with the past; language is very much a part of that cultural group and far from irrelevant to the preservation of cultural identity. Just because you don't speak it doesn't mean those who do don't have a right to be able to keep it going. Anyway, Latin might be a dead language but it's still very widely used, and Amazon has no qualms about publishing in Latin even though it hasn't been a living language in centuries.

But really the question you should be asking is why shouldn't Amazon publish the book? I can't imagine they'd have trouble supporting a language written using Latin letters - like English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and many other languages do. Amazon doesn't make spell checking software, it sells books. There's no reason Amazon should stop the publication of a book because of the language it's written in - not if the language in question is a recognised living language, as Cornish is. If it was one I just made up on the fly, I'd understand it, but it's not.

There should be nothing holding Amazon back - not even sales potential, because they let anyone publish anything that's never going to sell more than a dozen or so copies to friends and family of the author, and they allow things to go up there for free which is obviously not going to net them any income at all. So it can't be about money, or they'd stop free ebooks and prevent thousands of self publishers from publishing too.

No, Amazon is being obtuse; at best, lazy, at worst downright belligerent.

 

[Devor]

Some of this seems a little harsh. If it's the same alphabet, they could just publish it and list the language as English.

Amazon doesn't have Cornish listed as a language, so of course someone in the Customer Support department is going to tell them "we don't support Cornish at this time." Probably the people handling the language setups have never heard of Cornish, and this is probably the first time they've ever had a complaint. And you don't know, for instance, whether the customer support people escalated it to the IT department while they said "No" - that's the usual process at most companies.

So this seems a little overblown to me. It's not like Amazon corporate executives came out and blasted the language and said they'd never support it ever.

((edit))

And with a quick search, there are other bilingual books with English/Cornish on Amazon, and they list the language as "English."

 

[Kevin O. McLaughlin]

This seems like bad reporting to me. Not only is it NOT the first book in Cornish...it sounds like Amazon didn't refuse to publish it, they simply told the author they didn't have a language set up on the language drop down for Cornish. Nothing barred the writer from uploading the book as English.