That's an economics issue, not a technology one. Books are mass market items where it makes sense to translate it once and sell the translation thousands of tim

That's an economics issue, not a technology one. Books are mass market items where it makes sense to translate it once and sell the translation thousands of times. Putting a whole book into a translation software would generally be more laborious than tracking down an edition in the language of choice. But in 1954 there were no web pages and reading articles or papers published in foreign languages was extremely rare. Nowadays, these are all translated instantaneously for free by modern web browsers with reasonable fidelity. And odds are these make up the overwhelming majority of the foreign language material a modern person consumes.