Author here. The piece is about bibliographic infrastructure, but the finding that surprised me most while building the dataset was language-specific: Catalan/Valencian (~10M speakers) jumped from near-invisibility in commercial aggregators to 8th place globally once nine national library catalogues were cross-referenced. Bengali, Thai and Urdu —all with substantial publishing industries— remained near the bottom, not because translations don't exist but because the institutions documenting them haven't been connected yet. The 97% figure (editions appearing in only one of 14 sources) held across every sample I could run. Happy to answer questions about methodology, source coverage, or why ISBN metadata is such a mess.

Proper ISBN id is a lot of unpaid expensive work. If you run small print, you may have sent like 10% of all your prints to libraries at your own expense. Putting unregisted pdf on web is for free...

I deal with similar issues. Translation is sometimes thought of as a mechanical process, but it is a creative process where the translator’s approach varies from subtle to heavy-handed. At some point the translation can be thought of as a new creative work, and that line is hard to define.

One of my parents was a translator who worked directly with authors, and in the review process the author would expand or refine the text in ways that were not present in the original. At that point, which work is the true representation of the authors intent, the fixed original or the updated translation?