International Books

I’ve written a number of tech books, and my publisher often sells the rights to these books to international publishers who produce a localized version of the book.

Every once in a while my publisher sends me a paperback copy of one of these translated books. I thought I’d share some with you.

This is a Korean translation of Exercises for Programmers:

Sometimes the translated books have new images too. The Korean translators took the time to redo the diagrams in the book too:

In most cases you’ll find a different cover. But sometimes the covers are quite imaginative. Here is Web Development Recipes (Korean):

And sometimes, as shown in this Czech translation of my HTML5 book, it’s radically different!

In fact, the Czech translation is so good that the translator changed the code too. I rarely see that. It’s one thing to see images replaced, but a whole other thing to see the actual code snippets modified:

In this example the text in HTML HTML tags is localized.

Over the years, my books have been translated into Chinese, Korean, Russian, German, Polish, Czech, and Japanese.

The Korean translations always have the neatest covers. Here’s the Korean cover for the HTML5 book. The silver letters are shiny!

I hope you enjoyed that little tour of how tech books look in other languages. I haven’t received any newer translated copies recently, and I suspect that has something to do with the fact that paper tech books are on the decline.