Multilingual Open-Access Philosophy and the Geography of Readership

What happens when a philosophical work is released simultaneously in multiple languages and allowed to circulate without any promotion across the global open-access ecosystem? A multilingual experiment conducted between 2023 and 2025 involving the editorial performance of four edited philosophical works by the author, on PhilPapers platform (90%) and external links(10%), offers an empirical answer. The experiment measured the reception of philosophical works published in fifteen languages, and sought to comparatively evaluate the editorial performance of these editions after a period of 36 months following their publication in open access. The results—41,760 downloads of a single e-book across 184 countries and institutional access from 125 universities—reveal a far more geographically and linguistically distributed readership for philosophy than conventional publication models generally assume.