Jarl Hellemann on the state of the book
  in the land of the mobile phone


What should the role of the book be in the new information society? How can we ensure the survival of literacy and the practice of reading in a world turned upside down by the flood of information and new media? These questions are faced by decision-makers responsible for culture and education the world over. Finland makes no exception in this respect. Nowhere else has the transition to the age of electronic information technology been swifter – or more economically rewarding – than in Finland.
     At the beginning of the new millennium, Finland is one of the world's most highly developed centres of information technology, a pioneer in the areas of both mobile telephone technology and internet adaptation. Three out of four Finns have a mobile telephone in their pocket. Pensioners attend courses to learn how to manage their bank accounts and shopping with the help of a computer. Young people spend their leisure time 'chatting' with new friends on the other side of the world and tapping out mobile-phone text messages to each other so enthusiastically that economists are beginning to worry that too large a proportion of the gross national product is derived from this kind of unproductive information exchange. A nation which only a few decades ago, in Bertolt Brecht's famous words, 'kept silence in two languages', now babbles incessantly into its beloved gadgets as the share values of the telecommunications companies rise, and domestic telephone bills soar sky-high.
     Even in terms of use of time, this dizzying change of habits has begun to worry those who carry responsibility for the survival of the habit of traditional reading. Two years ago, the Finnish ministry of education commissioned a research project, 'Reading skills in the information society', and its first interim report, Kirja Suomessa ('The book in Finland'), appeared this spring. The report surveys the current situation in the publishing and distribution of books and sets out the financial support mechanisms now available for books.
     Part of the brief to the author of the report, Doris Stockmann, and her assistants was also to present suggestions for measures to develop the book in Finland. Stockmann is well-qualified to succeed in her work, as she has behind her solid practical experience in the book trade as, among other things, the executive director of the large Academic Bookstore, and at the head of organisations in many fields. Her perspective is, naturally, centred on bookshops, but the report nevertheless offers a broad portrait of the situation. It has, indeed, been praised above all for the impressive amount of basic information about the book trade on which it is based. The continuing updating of the statistical material contained in the report is considered an important basis for the databank of the field which is currently being drawn up.
     The Finnish bookshop system includes features which are not very well-known abroad and whose details may remain unclear to foreign readers of the report. One of them is the sample stock system (a kind of consigment sale), which has been in use since 1949, and which is one explanation of why Finnish publishers have been able to avoid something which is problematic elsewhere, namely the uncontrolled return of books ordered by bookshops. In Sweden, Britain and the United States, a publishing house's yearly result can unexpectedly turn into a loss if returns suddenly exceed 30 per cent or more. In Finland, returns are unknown, as bookshops generally make firm orders. The sample stock which is an alternative to risky buying is expensive for publishers, but it does not include the surprises which threaten other buying systems.
     The problems faced by bookshops are largely the same as those in the rest of Europe. The bookshop network has grown sparser (from 800 shops to 300), and the field is not attracting new entrepreneurs or funding. Almost half of the 450 municipalities in Finland currently lack a bookshop. The profile of the big chains is becoming increasingly commercial, and as a result selections are decreasing, as are the shelf-lives of books. Since the basic reason is on the one hand societal change and on the other the free-price system which came into force in 1970 there is little to be done. Indeed, the report limits itself to fairly obvious recommendations: government support for the sample stock system and financial support for founding of new bookshops. The proposal of more comprehensive innovations could, indeed, hardly be considered the province of a research project such as this.
     In one respect, at least, foreign decision-makers have something to learn from the Finnish report. It demonstrates without question that the lowering of value-added tax which was instituted in the 1990s (from 20 per cent to 12 per cent in 1994, and from 12 per cent to 8 per cent in 1998) has, against all expectations, been passed on fully to the consumer and clearly increased the volume of sales, which is now almost 30 million books a year. Since value-added tax in Finland is still the fourth-highest in Europe, exceeding the recommendations of the European Union, the report suggests that taxation on books should be abolished entirely in Finland.
     Since the years of recession in the early 1990s, public book acquisitions have decreased greatly as a result of government savings measures. In ten years, acquisitions by public libraries have dropped by 32 per cent, and in 1998 represented only 1.6 million books. As a result of this, the graph of library loans, which had shown steady growth, began to decline in 1997, and although borrowing has remained, by international standards, very high (20 loans per person in 1997), there is a danger of a negative spiral, because acquisitions directly affect the number of loans. Since a separate report on the development of libraries has also been commissioned, Stockmann's report restricts itself to suggesting, as an emergency measure, support for the acquisition of small-readership quality literature and simplification of the acquisition system. The suggested funding is 4 per cent of the total book acquisitions of the previous year, which can hardly be considered excessive.
     The report does not comment on the abolition of the retail price maintenance system, which has been the subject of debate in many European countries, because this fateful question was resolved in Finland as long ago as 1971, despite the impassioned opposition of writers and organisations concerned with the book. The 30 years that have passed since then have demonstrated that all the drawbacks and threats that were foreseen have materialised, but that in spite of this overall production and sales of books have grown after the shift to to free pricing – although with all the polarisation that was forecast: the dominance of the best-seller has increased, and the publication of small-readership books become more difficult. The report comments that 'in Finland the return of the retail price maintenance system is not a realistic alternative'. This position probably represents the predominant opinion in the book trade today: the transition from a practice that has been in use for 30 years to a new one would not be easy, and the trade has learned to live with its disadvantages.
     The writers' organisations, which were most vociferous in their opposition of the freeing of prices, were compensated by developing a system of grants which was created in the early 1960s. The state's support for literature, as for art in general, is a necessity in a small country such as Finland. In this sense, traditions in Finland are different from those in the large countries of the West, in which private capital supports the arts, and the participation of the state is avoided for ideological reasons. The support of the government for books in Finland forms such an extensive and complex system that the amount of space devoted to it by the report, one third of the total number of pages, is justified. For domestic use, the report is in this sense a useful summary of all funding channels now in use. The foreign reader, on the other hand, would easily be confused by the jungle of different artists' grants, pensions, academicians' posts and professorships, government prizes, compensation for lending rights and promotional grants.
     In terms of money, the government's direct funding for authors and translators in 1997 was, according to the report, 26 million Finnmarks; a large sum, but only one thousandth of the ministry of education's administrative budget. The most important form of support is the compensation for free lending rights, which represent half of the total sum. Lending rights are paid in many countries to authors in compensation for the fact that their books can be borrowed without charge from public libraries. The system set in place in Finland in the early 1960s differs from others in the sense that the compensation it offers is not dependent on the number of loans or books bought by public libraries, but has from the beginning been a funding system completely separate from loans. It is indeed known as the 'library grant'.
     This exceptional system was intended to avoid the difficulties experienced in many countries. A compensation system based on loans rewards writers who generally sell well, and leaves writers less in demand with such small annual sums that it is not even worth distributing them. According to the Finnish system, the government makes an annual payment which is 10 per cent of the total library acquisitions budget, and this is given as grants for creative work and support for aging writers and translators. Largely as a result of this form of funding, some 200 writers and translators each year have been given the opportunity of continuing in a career that would not otherwise support them. According to a recent report by the Finnish Writers' Association, literary work offers a scant livelihood to only one in six professional writers, and places only one in ten among citizens of moderate income (more than 100,000 Finnmarks a year).
     The weakest aspect of the system is that, from the beginning, it was available only to writers of fiction, poetry and drama. Non-fiction writers, whose works are borrowed from libraries a great deal more than those of their literary colleagues, have so far been forced to make do with scraps. Doris Stockmann's report also proposes rectifying this wrong.
     The new media that compete with the book, from the internet to the electronic book, also fall within the scope of the report. The report does not at present see them as threats to the position of the book, as long as authors, distributors and producers learn to use these new, complementary, tools to their own benefit. The overall impression given by the report is that, despite problems, the position of the book and literature in Finland is still strong. In international terms, the publication and sales of books, and their borrowing from libraries, stand close to the head of the league in Finland. The development of digital contents and the means for reading them, together with the Finns' eagerness to adopt the new information techniques, nevertheless set a challenge for the printed book.
     It remains to be seen how much the government will feel able to implement the report's authors' wise advice once their proposals reach the politicians' desks.

An English-language summary of Kirja Suomessa ('The book in Finland' by Doris Stockmann, Niklas Bengtsson and Yrjö Repo, Edita, 2000) can be ordered from mervi.tiensuu-nylund@minedu.fi at the Finnish Ministry of Education.

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