Last week, on the eve of the Frankfurt Book Fair, the largest and oldest in the world (it dates back to the fifteenth century), AmazonCrossing, Amazon Publishing’s translation imprint, announced it would be committing $10 million over the next five years to publishing more works in translation. “We launched AmazonCrossing five years ago to introduce readers to voices of the world through English-language translations of foreign-language books,” AmazonCrossing’s publisher Sarah Jane Gunter said in a statement. “While we are now one of the largest publishers of translated literature in the United States, translated fiction is still a tiny fraction of new publications.”

Over the past five years, only Dalkey Archive, the uber-literary small press that has published books by authors like Carlos Fuentes, Viktor Shklovsky, and Danilo Kiš, has published more works in translation than AmazonCrossing. This year, AmazonCrossing plans to publish “77 titles from 15 countries and 12 languages” in the United States, which will almost certainly dwarf the output of Dalkey and its ilk. And, with this new $10 million commitment, the number of works in translation published by AmazonCrossing should continue to soar. Which means that AmazonCrossing will almost certainly be the largest publisher of translated literature in the United States for at least the next five years.

Of course, $10 million over five years for works in translation is not a world-shaking announcement—after all, Simon & Schuster just gave comedian Amy Schumer close to that amount for just one book. And, while AmazonCrossing did announce a few interesting tweaks to its operations (more on those in a moment), it is mostly committing to continuing to do what works, just on a slightly grander scale. Still, though $10 million over five years will not turn AmazonCrossing into a publishing powerhouse, it still has important implications for translators and for readers.

Despite Amazon’s contentious relationship with the larger publishing industry (Jeff Bezos, the corporation’s founder, once instructed his employees to “approach… small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle” in negotiations), the company runs a number of highly successful small and medium-sized publishing houses, including Thomas & Mercer, which focuses on thrillers, Little A, which publishes more literary fare, and AmazonCrossing.

Amazon’s imprints are somewhat isolated, both geographically and commercially, from the wider publishing world. Based in Seattle, not New York (where all major—and most minor—publishers are based), Amazon Publishing typically distributes its books only through Amazon.com. As a result, you won’t see them on the New York Times bestseller list, which discounts books that are only available from a single retailer, or on the subway: most are sold in electronic form at price points between $1.99 and $4.99.