Why don't English translated light novels retain the "backwards" page ordering? Despite us westerners reading from left-to-right, top-to-bottom from the front to back with the book spine on our left, when manga is translated and localized (officially) it retains the Japanese way of reading, right-to-left from the back forward with the book spine on our right.

From my understanding the Japanese read text from top-down in vertical lines and since this is probably too much for westerners, it's "corrected" in manga. However, while we still read the text left-to-right, the frames/pages of the manga still retain the right-to-left ordering.

With light novels however, this doesn't appear to be the case. With the light novels of Strawberry Panic localized by Seven Seas and Spice and Wolf localized by Yen Press, the books are read from left-to-right with the spine on our left; this includes the order of pages.

Now ignoring the obvious problems of printing the words backwards, why aren't English translated light novels printed with the reverse page ordering? Where we start from the back of the book with the spine on our right?
It makes absolutely no sense for a book consisting of just English text to have its pages ordered such that you read the page on the right followed by the page on the left. So of course people don't publish English translations of light novels that way.

However, it makes some sense for a book consisting of English text superimposed on images to be read right-to-left if that's how it was originally drawn. Why? Because to make it read left-to-right, you have to flip the images, and flipping the images can cause problems. 


Does character A mention out loud that character B is standing to the left of character C? Well, the opposite will be true if you flip the images. 
Is the manga set in Japan? Are there depictions of roads? If so, guess what? Japan drives on the right now! 
Does your swordsman use a peculiar left-handed stance to throw off his opponents? Not anymore - we're in some bizarro world where right-handed stances are apparently peculiar.
Japan is now the land of the setting sun. (Or, we're on anti-Earth, and the sun rises in the West. Your choice.)


And so on and so forth. There are legitimate reasons why you would want to publish English-translated manga right-to-left. Contrariwise, there are not any legitimate reasons to publish English-translated text right-to-left that come to mind. 

(Light novels do have pictures in them, but since the pictures are typically on separate textless pages, one can freely include those pages unflipped in a left-to-right English text without doing any harm.)