Books from Finland summarizes the numbers released by the Finnish Book Publishers' Association answering the question: How much did Finland read ? (in 2013).
Not that much, apparently: books sales were down 2.3 per cent from 2012 (apparently the fifth year in a row the numbers have gone down) -- though at least ... textbook sales were up.
Topping the Finnish fiction bestseller list for the year was Laila Hirvisaari's Catherine the Great-novel, Me, Keisarinna -- see also the Otava foreign rights information page -- which sold all of ... 62,800 copies (hey, it's a small country -- population ca. 5.45 million). And at least it outsold the bestselling work of translated fiction -- Dan Brown's Inferno, which shifted only 60,400 copies. (In fact, a mere 9,700 in sales was enough to put a title among the top 20 translated fiction books.)
For the totals in various categories, see the (Finnish) official list (warning ! dreaded pdf format !) .
(And may I ask/complain, yet again: why does the US seem to be the only (semi-major) country in the world that does not release actual sales numbers for its bestseller lists ? I still can not fathom how this is possible. Everything in this country -- movie box office, car sales, newspaper and magazine circulation -- is quantified and the numbers made public, but for some reasons book sales numbers can't be revealed ?)
Not that much, apparently: books sales were down 2.3 per cent from 2012 (apparently the fifth year in a row the numbers have gone down) -- though at least ... textbook sales were up.
Topping the Finnish fiction bestseller list for the year was Laila Hirvisaari's Catherine the Great-novel, Me, Keisarinna -- see also the Otava foreign rights information page -- which sold all of ... 62,800 copies (hey, it's a small country -- population ca. 5.45 million). And at least it outsold the bestselling work of translated fiction -- Dan Brown's Inferno, which shifted only 60,400 copies. (In fact, a mere 9,700 in sales was enough to put a title among the top 20 translated fiction books.)
For the totals in various categories, see the (Finnish) official list (warning ! dreaded pdf format !) .
(And may I ask/complain, yet again: why does the US seem to be the only (semi-major) country in the world that does not release actual sales numbers for its bestseller lists ? I still can not fathom how this is possible. Everything in this country -- movie box office, car sales, newspaper and magazine circulation -- is quantified and the numbers made public, but for some reasons book sales numbers can't be revealed ?)