I must say this, because I am known to be a patternist, a word I just used in place of “someone who recognizes patterns.” Then I looked it up, and it turns out it’s a series of books by Octavia Butler.
Which is a great way to start off this post.
I have a method to my hunting and pecking for ebooks out in the wild. I’ve collected thousands. And I have noticed this pattern.
Whenever I search for ebooks in the wild, I get a surprising number of results in Italian. At first I thought, “wow, the Italians are really into their occult literature,” but then I realized I was projecting, because that happened to be what I was searching for at the time. When I just searched for Octavia Butler ebooks, I came across a bunch of results in Italian there as well.
What secret story lies behind this phenomena? Is it a simple extension of Italians being big readers? Or is it a measure of tech-savvy capabilities, trends in piracy, lax enforcement? I’m genuinely confused.
Here’s why: In a ranking of languages by number of speakers, Italian ranks 29th. English ranks first. Counting both first- and second-language speakers, Italian accounts for 67 million, while English accounts for nearly a billion and a half, most of which are second-languagers. Even if you remove languages that might not show up due to non-Latin characters, such as many Asian languages, it still doesn’t explain why Italian results show up so much in search results. If anyone has any clues, I’m genuinely curious.