tl;dr Go Books is now offering some books in a single non-English language instead of bundling all languages for a book into a single purchase.

I just added three German-only books to gobooks.com:

• “Elementary Techniken” by Thomas Hillebrand
• “Strategie” by Richard Bozulich
• “Angriff und Verteidigung” by Akira Ishida and James Davies

The first is new to Go Books, the second was already present as “The Basics of Go Strategy” (in English, Spanish, and German), and the third is “Attack and Defense”, which did not have a German translation in Go Books. German has been removed from “The Basics of Go Strategy” – if you already have that book and were reading it in German, please let me know, and I will get you a complimentary copy of “Strategie”.

Why this shift? The previous approach had advantages in producing and maintaining the book (the diagrams were shared between languages, so any fixes would apply to all languages), but it became clear that there were some significant disadvantages that limited the creation of translated versions:

• Different language editions might be by different publishers, with different royalty requirements.
• With no way to tell which language people were buying and reading, it was hard to decide which translations were worth it.

Most books with translations remain multi-lingual for now, as we see how this experiment works out. The “Lehrbücher des Go” series of six books will be completed as German-only books, adding German translations for “Tesuji” by James Davies, “Counting Liberties and Winning Capturing Races” by Richard Hunter, as well as “Leben und Tod” by Gunnar Dickfeld.