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Ulla-Leena Lundberg Picture: Teos.fi |
E-book sales have been sluggish in Finland, as displayed by the sales figures of the latest Finlandia Prize winning novel, Jää, by Ulla-Leena Lundberg.
According to the Finnish newspaper, Uusi Suomi, Lundberg’s best selling book has sold over 100,000 old-fashioned paper copies, but only 100 e-books. That’s a mere 0.1 percent of the total sales. And this is even less than the total Finnish e-book sales in 2012 , which made 1% of total book sales, compared to about 10 % in Britain.
But Jää may be a bad example. It’s a high-end fiction title, a genre which often attracts a different kind of buyer. Award-winning books are also often bought as a present, which could explain the low e-book figure, say the Finnish publishers of Jää, Teos.

In spite of the disappointing sales of e-books, the trend is definitely on the up, even in Finland. According to the Finnish Book Publishers Association, printed book sales went down in 2012, while the sales of e-books rose in the same period by 8%.
Because the cost of publishing an e-books is negligible, there has been an explosion of independently published e-books by author/ entrepreneurs worldwide. The Fifty Shadestrilogy is one such success story, which has made author E L James a millionaire.
This trend is bound to be mirrored in Finland, so who knows, at this very moment there may be a Finnish independent author who is penning his or her best-selling e-book. In my view, that is when the sales of e-books in Finland will also explode.
This article was also published in the summer issue of the Finn Guild magazine, Horisontti.
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