Amazon, Kindle and the case for Cornish

With ever-expanding digital libraries, digital reading platforms must become more open to languages other than English
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A woman using an iPad to read Russian
Kindle-unfriendly languages such as Russian are gaining ground online. Photograph: Asia Photopress/Alamy

Diglot Books is a small, independent publisher based in Buckinghamshire, specialising in bilingual books for children. Their first title in 2011 was an English-Dutch ABC book that uses words with the same initial in both languages: banaan and banana, leeuw and lion, regenboog and rainbow.

For St Piran's Day this year, Diglot wanted to release an ebook in English and Cornish of one of their bestsellers, Esmee Carré and Paul Wrangles's Matthew and the Wellington Boots. But after submitting the book to the Kindle store they received a notification from Amazon that "the book is in a language that is not currently supported by Kindle Direct Publishing". It turns out that the list of Kindle's supported languages is a short one of 10: while it includes Catalan, Galician and Basque alongside the major western European languages, there's no Cornish – nor is there Welsh, Dutch or a number of others that Diglot publishes in. Despite appeals to the fact that Cornish uses exactly the same character set as English, pleas to Amazon Support fell on deaf ears. Luckily, a bit of publicity and the interest of the Cornish Language Board seemed to get their attention, and (without explanation) Matthew ha'n Eskisyow Glaw is now available from the Kindle Store, as well as iBooks and Diglot's website.

The issue of languages in ebooks is likely to be with us for some time, however. As device manufacturers expand into new territories, the range of languages requiring support increases. A March 2013 study showed that while English is still dominant on the internet, at 54.7% of all pages, others, including Kindle-unfriendly Russian, Polish, Turkish and Arabic at numbers two, nine, 11 and 12 respectively, are gaining fast. To keep up with the expanding digital libraries, our reading tools need to be more open too.

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