Sari Airola's illustration in Silva och teservisen som fick fötter (‘Silva and the tea set that took to its feet’, Schildts) by Sanna Tahvanainen

The future of book publishing is not easy to predict. Books for children and young people are still produced in large quantities, and there’s no shortage of quality, either. But will the books find their readers? Päivi Heikkilä-Halttunen takes a look at the trends of 2011, while in the review section we’ve picked out a selection of last year’s best titles

The supply of titles for children and young adults is greater than ever, but the attention the Finnish print media pays to them continues to diminish. Writing about this genre appears increasingly ghettoised, featuring only in specialist publications or internet chat rooms and blogs.

Yet, defying the prospect of a recession, Suomen lastenkirjakauppa, a bookshop specialising in children’s literature, was re-established in central Helsinki in autumn 2011, following a ten-year break. Pro lastenkirjallisuus – Pro barnlitteraturen ry, the Finnish society for the promotion of children’s literature, has been making efforts to found a Helsinki centre dedicated to writing and illustration for children. The society made progress in this ambition when it organised a pilot event in May 2011.

The Finnish publishing sector is undergoing changes, which also have an impact on books for children and young adults – even though such developments are not trumpeted. The number of small independents and self-publishers continues to grow. At their best, their products do not necessarily lag behind those of the big publishing houses. Even so, the professional editorial skills and long-standing expertise of the major publishers are reflected in quality as well as in the level of investment, both of which are increasingly consistent. But smaller publishers, too, reap fame and fortune through prizes and nominations. Karisto was particularly successful in 2011; over the last few years, it has invested in domestic books for children and young adults with renewed enthusiasm.

It remains to be seen how the recent merger of the two Finland-Swedish publishers, Schildts and Söderströms, will affect the amount of Finnish-Swedish children’s literature that is published. This language area has seen the emergence of many new and distinctive authors of picture books in particular.

The serial format has been on the increase since 2000, but it may soon be on the wane; authors themselves are already publicly and extensively questioning the excessive concentration on series. Domestic writing continues to reflect the popularity of fantasy, while authors are fortunately displaying growing willingness to replace international narrative patterns with variations on home-grown Finnish folklore. For example, Ritva Toivola makes use of ghost stories and folk tales in her historical novel for young adults, Anni unennäkijä (‘Anni the dreamer’, Tammi). In her collection of tales, Lymyvuoren peikot, (‘The trolls of Skulk Mountain’, Tammi, illustrated by Christel Rönns), Eija Simonen dives into the underground world of trolls and, at the same time, into the human unconscious.

Dystopia, fantasy that reaches out into the future, is clearly on the way to becoming a new and trendy subgenre of domestic fantasy. The best examples include Annika Luther’s De hemlösas stad (‘The city of the homeless’, Söderströms), as well as Routasisarukset (‘The frost children’,WSOY), the splendid opening volume of Anne Leinonen and Eija Lappalainen’s fantasy trilogy. Both novels contain trenchant criticism of society and of the destruction of nature.

The realistic novel for young adults is clearly going through a critical stage. The number of self-contained (non-serial) novels for young people is decreasing. This literary genre needs new, young authors, bolder than their predecessors, to work alongside old hands. In addition to descriptions of traditional growing pains, there is interest in topical subjects. For example, Marja-Leena Tiainen’s novel Kahden maailman tyttö (‘The girl from two worlds’, Tammi) addresses cultural differences and the adaptation of an immigrant to her new surroundings. The work deserved as much media attention as Layla, a comparable novel for adults by Jari Tervo.

Vilja-Tuulia Huotarinen’s Valoa valoa valoa (‘Light light light’, Karisto), which won last year’s Finlandia Junior Prize, provoked sharp exchanges on the internet, as some older readers disapproved of the novel’s uninhibited depiction of sexuality. In fact, it is a good sign that literature aimed at older teenagers is coming close to matching the diversity of adult literature, and Huotarinen’s work satisfies the literary taste of the most demanding of adult readers.

Translated by Fleur Jeremiah and Emily Jeremiah

The author, a scholar and critic, specialises in books for children and young adults. She runs a blog (in Finnish), in which she reviews new books for children and young adults

Review section:

Tuuve Aro: Korson purppuraruusu (‘The purple rose of Korso’, WSOY)

Vilja-Tuulia Huotarinen: Valoa valoa valoa (‘Light light light’, Karisto)

Hannele Huovi & Krsitiina Louhi: Jättityttö ja Pirhonen (‘The giand girl and Mr Pirhonen’, Tammi)

Jani Kaaro: Evoluutio (‘Evolution’, Avain)

Leena Krohn: Auringon lapsia (‘Children of the sun’, Teos)

Annika Luther: De hemlösas stad / Kodittomien kaupunki (‘The city of the homeless’, Söderströms)

Sanna Tahvanainen & Sari Airola: Silva och teservisen som fick fötter / Silva ja teekalusto joka sai jalat alleen (‘Silva and the tea set that took to its feet’, Schildts)

Marja-Leena Tiainen: Kahden maailman tyttö (‘The girl from two worlds’, Tammi)

Maria Vuorio: Kuningattaren viitta ja muita kiperiä kysymyksiä (‘The queen’s cloak and other knotty issues’, Tammi)

Samuel, the creation of Tommi Musturi (featured in Books from Finland on 7 May, 2010, entitled ‘Song without words’)

Comics? The Finnish word for them, sarjakuva, means, literally, ‘serial picture’, and lacks any connotation with the ‘comic’. The genre, which now  also encompasses works called graphic novels, has been the subject of celebrations this year in Finland, where it has reached its hundredth birthday. Heikki Jokinen takes a look at this modern art form

Comics are an art form that combines image and word and functions according to its own grammatical rules. It has two mother tongues: word and image. Both of them carry the story in their own way. Images and sequences of images have been used since ancient times to tell stories, and stories, for their part, are the common language of humanity. The long dark nights of the stone age were no doubt enlivened by storytellers.

One of the pioneers of comics was the Swiss artist Rodolphe Töpffer. As early as 1837, he explained how his books, combinations of images and words, should be read: ‘This little booklet is complex by nature. It is made up of a series of my own line drawings, each accompanied by a couple of lines of text. Without text, the meaning of the drawings would remain obscure; without drawings, the text would remain without content. The whole gives birth to a sort of novel – but one which is in fact no more reminiscent of a novel than of any other work.’

Comics look extremely easy to read; their images and text seem readily understandable, sometimes even making a simple impression. They are easy to read superficially, and for the reader to have the impression that they have seen it all. But even the simplest comic strip demands of its readers a complex capacity to interpret and distinguish. They must be able to read both images and words. Visual codes are freer in form than textual codes. The grammar of images is not made up of firm rules, but is flexible and capable of innovation. In comics, form and content indeed interact very closely.

The language of comics has many equivalences with other modes of expression. It is most commonly compared with cinema, a contemporary of comics and, like comics, originally a mode of expression intended as innocent entertainment for the masses. Both proceed in time – unlike, for example, art or photography – and comics use photographic angles and close-up and distance shots, like film. Between the individual images of comics there arises a relationship that is more than the images themselves.

The centenary of comics in Finland is celebrated this year: 21 November 1911 saw the publication of the first Finnish comic-strip album, Professori Itikaisen tukimusretki (‘Professor Itikainen’s expedition’), drawn and written by Ilmari Vainio.

Comics began to interest Finnish makers particularly during the 1960s and 1970s: it was part of the radical Zeitgeist to question the old cultural hierarchies, and comics were considered part of popular culture, which was held in increasing value. Moreover, the developing copier technology enabled artists to produce their own magazines: comics became a popular hobby. In the 1990s, it became possible for comics makers to apply for government arts funding.

Fifty or more Finnish comics titles are published every year. Strip cartoons appear in most Finnish newspapers and periodicals; readers are interested in cartoons of many different genres and styles. Collected volumes of strip cartoons are sold in large numbers: Juba Tuomola’s Viivi & Wagner albums have sold more than a million copies. Finnish newspaper strips differ from the American mainstream, which often centre on harmless japes. The most popular Finnish strops are biting in their irony and even dare to speak of sex. Their world is not a hermetic universe of its own: society, politics and world events are often present. Comics books often feature among Finland’s best-selling titles.

Comics are a flexible genre which includes many different modes of graphic and narrative expression, and comics artists delight in exploiting this freedom. Content may be anything at all: information, humour, drama, human relationships, history…. Many comics are published on the internet, and this greatly increases audiences. With the exception of humorous strips, however, the Finnish comic rarely attracts mass audiences.

Since 2000, around one hundred Finnish comics books have been published in translation. This is a great deal bearing in mind both the volume of the genre and the number of Finnish translations published as a whole. Print runs, however, are often small, and funds limited. The best thing about it, however, is that it is not a question merely of a couple of stars, although the Moomin comic strip (1954–1975), drawn by Tove Jansson (1914–2001) and subsequently by her brother Lars Jansson (it was also published in the London Evening News and was syndicated to about 40 other countries) has enjoyed a vigorous second coming since the Canadian publication Drawn&Quarterly began, in 2006, successfully to republish the Moomin strips in bookform. All in all, translations have appeared of books by more than 20 Finnish comics artists.

This autumn’s most important work of the genre is Ville Tietäväinen’s Näkymättömät kädet (‘Invisible hands’). This graphic novel, an impressive volume in terms of both its size and itscontent, tells the story of Rashid, a paperless migrant from Morocco to Spain. Through the story of one person, Tietäväinen speaks of important matters: poverty, human value and what keeps us going, hope. The book was well received and sold in, in Finnish terms, large numbers. It is also to be published in France.

Näkymättömät kädet sparked considerable literary debate. Its publisher submitted it for the country’s leading literary prize, the Finlandia Prize for Fiction, but it was not accepted. A graphic novel still does not count as a novel for everyone.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

The following extract is from Ville Tietäväinen’s Näkymättömät kädet (‘Invisible hands’, WSOY, 2011):  click the pictures to make them appear enlarged on your screen (then click again for further enlargement). The main character, a Moroccan tailor called Rashid, is sacked from his job, which forces him to emigrate and live his life as an illegal alien in Spain.

Ville Tietäväinen (born 1970) is an architect by training, and now works as a graphic designer and illustrator. Näkymättömät kädet is his third graphic novel; it combines both fiction and facts he collected on his travels in Morocco and Spain. His previous book, the award-winning Linnut ja Meret (‘The birds, The oceans’, Tammi, 2003), is also published in France (2005).

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Who's been eating my porridge? From ‘English Fairy Tales’ by Flora Annie Steel (1918), illustrated by Arthur Rackham. The Project Gutenberg e-Book

In the classic fairy-tale, on finding their belongings were not as they had left them, the three bears exclaimed: ‘Who’s been eating my porridge?’ When our technology correspondent Teemu Manninen found someone else’s underlinings in the electronic text he was reading, he wondered: ‘Who’s been tampering with my ebook?’ Which led him to ponder how similar books and their virtual counterparts really are – and could his ebook really be called ‘his’?

A few months ago I was reading an ebook on my iPad when I came across an underlined passage. For a moment I felt strangely disturbed. My initial thought was that I had not made the underlining, and therefore this had to be a glitch, an error in the computer program that was the book, which meant that there was something wrong with my book. What made this thought disturbing was the realisation that the kinds of harm that can befall digital books – and the measures that one can take to prevent them – are no longer ‘in my hands’: that the book is no longer physical, but virtual.

The ebook is code, not paper; electrical charges, not ink. I need complex machinery to access it and make it visible, and this complex machinery requires a complex network of industrial design, production and technical support to function. I can’t – or at least I shouldn’t – throw it across the room or against a wall if I become frustrated with it. (I can, however, under certain circumstances, spill tea on it and it won’t stain.)

I had known all this, of course, but I had not felt it before. Now I had: for some reason, an error in a digital book felt like a different kind of entity from a tear in the page of a paper book. It was a strange feeling: as if what had before manifested itself in a series of relationships with tangible, discrete objects – the individual materiality of books, which could be comprehended through the sensation of touch and its bounded, in-my-hands nature – had given way to a relationship with another kind of entity, the abstract, boundless domain of ‘text’ (the cloud of virtual writing) which I could only glimpse and navigate through the ‘window’ I held in my hand.

Touching the device was not the same as touching a book, suddenly. I realised that my most immediate, sensible relationship was with my iPad: it had become the intermediary, the silent priest allowing me access to the intangible, spiritual medium of literature.

While this thought processed its way through my head I came upon another: what I was seeing was not in fact a glitch, but someone else’s underlinings that the Kindle ebook service had made visible. Someone, somewhere, had considered this passage to be noteworthy or important in some fashion – and a very short moment of relief gave way to a feeling of irritation, a kind of territoriality: who was this person interfering with my reading experience? How dare they make drawings in my book!

Then, a microsecond later, I had to recognise another alienating truth about digital books: it wasn’t my book that I was reading. I had merely bought indefinite grazing rights that allowed me to lounge about on this particular piece of literary real estate. Others could do so as well, and make their journey through the landscape visible by grafting such graffiti in the paragraphs of text along the way. Knowing that this feature could be turned off did not make things any less weird, since the ability to turn something on or off in a book served only to strengthen the uncanny difference that I have lately started to feel exists between virtual and material reading.

I know very well that I ought to think of these markings as being like those one comes across when reading a used book. And in truth, I used to like those traces of the physicality of reading: the marginal notes in old books that I would find on forgotten shelves in the university library, their indecipherable code phrases designating individual moments of clarity, hesitation or befuddlement; the heavy lines of colourful mark-up pens in school textbooks passed down from kids that had moved on to higher grades; the title-page dedications, the ex libris of ownership, and later, in my scholarship, the love I developed for the practices of the Renaissance, that period in the history of the private-and-yet-shared reading when only books that were copiously annotated by hand with all manner of marginalia were considered ready for proper use.

I still love those practices and disagree with anyone who thinks the pages of a book should stay pristine and untouched even by oxygen or dust. But virtual and material writing and reading are not the same thing. Like so many of the applications and products of information technology, the digitisation of literature is based on the idea of making a digital copy of an analog thing: translating a material object into an image of itself. Because our brains happen to be wired that way, and since images of objects can sometime mimic those objects almost to a fault, we humans often confuse these images with the objects they represent. A digital recording sounds – at least to an untrained ear – like an analog recording. A digital book has text just like a paper book has text. What’s the difference?

The difference is, literally, in the details. Everyone knows that looking at a painting in a gallery is not the same thing as looking at it on a screen. The one has a topography, the three-dimensional physicality of paint on canvas, our approach to it contextualised by the surrounding social ritual of attention in a gallery space; the other is two-dimensional, caught within the private meanings produced by all the other uses we have for whatever piece of technology makes viewing the image possible. The same applies for the production of material and virtual images. Drawing on a Wacom tablet with a digital pen is not the same thing as drawing on heavy rag paper with a piece of charcoal. The difference is, then, precisely in the fact that an ebook is an image of a text, while a book has text in it.

What made all these thoughts so very ironical was that the underlined passage occurred in a book by the science fiction author John C. Wright which portrayed a far future Earth where the wealthy could move through the world and see, remember, hear, taste and feel it in any way they wished, since information could be altered and sense perception filtered, memories rewritten and reality be reduced to ‘channels’ that you could either ignore or subscribe to, depending on your whims.

The book, called The Golden Age, was one in a series that told the story of Phaethon (yes, named after the earth-and-sky-scorching mythological son of Phoebus the sun-god). In Wright’s story, Phaethon was an engineering genius who was disappointed with humanity for having never ventured farther than the solar system. He wanted to change the world and shake it out of its complacency: to build a spaceship and ‘go where no one had gone before’ – to leave a life of virtuality behind in order to reach new frontiers in the material world.

It has been said that despite the advances in technology and science and culture of the last decades, we haven’t really invented or discovered anything really new in a long time. Everything we do is just an iteration or a more detailed, more efficient picture of the computer, the neurology of the unconscious, of rock and roll, of DNA, or the theory of relativity. And if our culture is just an image of the culture of previous generations, what does that say about the digital future of literature, these images of images? What kind of Phaethon will we need, when those days come to pass – or are they already here?

Juhani Aho. Photo: SKS/Literary archives

Yksin is the tale of a fashionable, no-longer-young ‘decadent’, alienated from his bourgeois circle, and with his aesthetic stances and social duties in crisis. He flees from his disappointments and heartbreaks to Paris, the foremost metropolis at the end of the 19th century, where solitude could be experienced in the modern manner – among crowds of people. Yksin is the first portrayal of modern city life in the newly emerging Finnish prose, unique in its time.

Aho’s story has parallels in the contemporary European literature: Karl-Joris Huysmans’s A Rebours (1884), Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (1890) and Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1890).

The novella reflects the innovatory trends of the period. At the end of the 19th century the new prose was no longer interested in a story line that traced an individual’s course of life. The story was chopped, spatially and temporally, into sequences, which didn’t produce a connected narrative or create a well-constructed plot but sought recurrent situations, motifs, images and symbols, patterns and rhythm. Aho’s classic novel of 1884, Rautatie (‘Railway’) is still a product of realism; but the lyrical prose in Yksin is closer to the art of poetry than rapportage. This kind of artistry – which Aho himself discussed in the 1880s in his newspaper articles on Finnish prose – is connected to the pictorial art of the period. The facial profile of the adored Anna, who has rejected the narrator, is a recurrent, lyrical leitmotif.

Aho was personally but unrequitedly enamoured of the young upper-class beauty Aino Järnefelt. When her future husband, the composer Jean Sibelius, read Yksin in Vienna in 1890, he was so enraged he swore to write a letter challenging Aho to a duel. The letter was never posted.

The critics of the day were mostly confounded by the novella’s structural and stylistic innovation. Particularly indigestible was the climax, where the narrator spends Christmas Eve at Le Moulin Rouge in the company of a prostitute.

Aho’s bold Parisian sojourner stirred up public contention, precisely as the writer had hoped. In 1891, discussing literary prizes, the Finnish parliament had a vigorous debate on whether government bursaries were at all necessary. Yksin was soon published in Swedish as well. Observing the furore from Sweden, the Aftonbladet newspaper critic commented aptly: ‘It was a description of the kind of goings-on qui se font, mais qui ne se disent point (‘things that do happen but are not spoken about’).’

Aho also recognised the importance, from the beginning, of the translation of his works, which demonstrates his clear understanding of literature as a market-area that transcended national boundaries. Leafing through Juhani Ahon kirjallinen tuotanto (‘Juhani Aho’s literary oeuvre’, edited by N.P. Virtanen, 1961), one is amazed how much, and into how many languages, Aho has been translated.

There is, of course, a wide range in the languages in which Aho’s work has appeared. As generators of cultural production, Paris and London decided literary standards. Access to the markets of the metropolises meant not only the opportunity to reach the broad Anglo- and Francophone readerships, but was also a trump card that had its uses on the home market. The centres of the time remained cool toward Aho: he has been translated only a little into English and French. The German literary world, on the other hand, embraced Aho warmly. Many translations were published, representing the best of the writer’s work.

His most important market, however, was Sweden, where translations of Aho’s work were issued immediately, right up to his last book, Muistatko –? (‘Do you remember – ?’,1921). Aho’s reputation in Sweden became considerable as early as the 1880s and 1890s. It is difficult to say whether his fame rested only on its literary merits, or on the sympathy toward Finnish literature that Swedes felt toward little Finland during a period of intense Russification in the Grand Duchy. This big-brother attitude may well explain Aho’s later succes in Stockholm, when the Swedish Academy began, at the beginning of the new century, to give the Nobel Prize for Literature, which has become the world’s premier literary award.

The status of the prize is uncontested today, and there is perhaps no greater proof of the international convergence of literary standards than the global attention the prize receives every year. The prize is awarded on the basis of a long-term study of the writer’s work and literary statements from independent experts.

Aho had been a candidate for the Nobel Prize for the first time as early as 1902. From 1910, he was suggested regularly right up to 1921. Aho’s candidacy was at first marked by a benevolently positive attitude, which was felt, in particular, toward the aspects of his work which were felt to be idealistic.

In 1913 the history professor Harald Hjärne was appointed chairman of the award committee. Hjärne had a particular view of Finland’s cultural position, and in his literary summaries he repeatedly quashed the idea of awarding Aho the prize on the grounds that Finnish-language literature could not be thus recognised without simultaneously giving an award to Finland’s Swedish-language literature. When no individual named writers were proposed, the chairman himself suggested the Finland-Swedish poet Bertel Gripenberg. Since, on the other hand, no independent expert had suggested Gripenberg, it was logical, in terms of this masterly piece of prestidigitation, that the prize could not be awarded to Aho either.

Hjärne had no knowledge of the development of Finnish society; neither did he understand the increasing linguistic overlap that was developing in Finland despite the minor skirmishes of day-to-day politics. The Swedish-language writers Runeberg and Topelius had become part of Finnish-language literature, just as the Kalevala had become part of Swedish-language literature. Juhani Aho’s generation had also started a development in which Finnish- and Swedish-language literature were increasingly regarded as Finnish literature that was written in two languages.

The Aho internationalisation project demonstrates the strength of the period’s centre-periphery links as well as the inequality that was hidden in these structures. In order to achieve international fame outside the centres, it was necessary to seek the approval of markets in Paris and London. With any luck, the next stop was Stockholm. Successful tours were made later by many writers, such as the American William Faulkner, the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, and the Chinese Qao Xinjian.

Juhani Aho stepped forward from a very young literary tradition. He achieved critical success in his local environment, but never really made an international breakthrough. This is visible in the international canons of the period. They include, incontrovertibly, Ibsen (from Norway) and Strindberg (from Sweden), but not a single Finnish writer.

Aho’s internationalisation project, however, was the starting shot for a lengthy development after which now, a hundred years later, looks as if Finnish-language literature has attained international significance which is not limited to sales figures and film deals, important as they are.

Last year the young writer Sofi Oksanen received, in Paris, recognition that no other Finnish writer had earlier achieved. Having first garnered every possible Finnish literary award, then the Nordic Literature Prize, her third novel, Puhdistus (Purge, 2008) won, in the autumn of 2011, the important French literary award, the Prix Femina.

Puhdistus achieved the most important prize of all: it became accepted, recognised and admired by the Parisian literary establishment – like Aki Kaurismäki in film and Kaija Saariaho in music. The years to come will show whether Oksanen’s unprecedented success will be crowned by the hundred-year project begun by Juhani Aho and his generation, whose aim was to place Finnish literature and culture in the European time zone.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

High in the sky: cumulus clouds. Photo: Michael Jastremski, Wikimedia

I’m sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of a cottage by a lake. My fingers tap and slide on the surface of a black glass panel, a kind of instrument used in the composing of literature. Each tap equals a letter, a series of taps equals a word, a symphony of taps becomes a paragraph, a paragraph an essay.

The glass panel remembers these letters and words and the writings they become, and knows them by their names, but it could also record anything I see or hear. I could even talk to it and it would understand my commands, as if some nether spirit were captured inside, a magic genie slaved to do my bidding.

If I command the spirit, it can send all that I have written into the sky, into the clouds where it lives; the heavens where the gods used to live. Now the cloud is occupied by another space altogether, a kind of information-aether existing everywhere around us. In this information-space my words will organise themselves into a file in a kind of imaginary drawer, or a lockbox that I have rented from these benevolent spiritual forces in order to store these other-dimensional ditherings for later perusal.

At some point in the future I will use a larger glass window into which I will stare like an enchanter into a scrying glass, and the window will open a portal into that other world, and I will there open the same lockbox and take out the file I have written in a cottage by a lake. This time I will be at home, writing this sentence in order to convey to you the sense of wonder I sometimes feel when tapping on my black glass panel like some techno-witch in a sci-fi tale.

What I have been describing is of course what is called, in a fitting poetic gesture, cloud computing. Cloud computing simply means that all the things we do, all the things we create on our computers, the files and documents and images and whatnot do not have to exist physically ‘in’ your computer. They will exist somewhere else, and you will access them through the internet. All that word processing, all those spread sheets and email and calendars, manuscripts and drafts, none of them will exist anywhere near where you are working on them, but in another computer perhaps thousands of miles away. To me this signals a profound change in the material nature of writing and reading that no one seems to be talking about.

The unaddressed nature of cloud computing and its impact on the future of the book might be due to the fact that most discussion has been centred around the way new technology will change the economy and the institutions of publishing. We don’t really hear actual readers and writers talk about the impact these new technologies have had on their life. So, I’m now asking: is this gift the cloud-gods have given us a blessing or a curse?

First, from the point of view of my reading habits, the change from a physical library to a cloud library has been mostly wonderful, yet somewhat frustrating, because the change has not proceeded fast enough. Last year I’ve read more books on my ‘smartphone’ than on paper. It’s almost too easy to buy books online, as it may take less than a minute for them to arrive. I would read even more, but what I tend to read is often unavailable in ebook form (for example, niche authors of obscure fantasy – Michael Cisco, Abram Tertz, David Ohle and Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky). This has made me impatient in a rather comically paradoxical way: ‘I can’t wait for them to mail me the book’, I think to myself, ‘and it’s more expensive anyway’ – so I end up not getting the book at all, because I would much rather wait wait for the digital version. Sadly, sometimes this wait might take forever, if copyright law stays the way it is.

My impatience also has other adverse effects. Because the books I want are not available, it’s too easy to read bad books that are. You can get mediocre space adventures or romance novels for five euros: the literary equivalent of fast food. Bingeing on such cheap fare, I haven’t even thought of the most worrying aspects of cloud libraries: the possibility of losing all my ebooks. My phone might break down, or the files might become corrupted, or the network might be hacked, and I couldn’t peruse any of the 25 books I’m currently reading. But still, I can take my books everywhere and read them any time I want –  with paper books you have to choose what, where and when to read.

If my reading has been enhanced, the best thing about this new paradigm has been the new writing tools it has given me. For me, one of the main concerns has always been the management of my incredibly bad memory and the inappropriate times when inspiration occurs. I need to write a good idea down right away, or I’ll forget it. Since new ideas tend to strike when nowhere near my office or my home, like on a train, in a hotel room, in a cafe or shopping, I’ve always hated laptops because they are just so unwieldy. Mine is small but still too large, the battery doesn’t last, and it’s impossible to take it out of your pocket just to write down one sentence. And while it’s possible to go to a cafe or a library to work and wait for those good ideas to come to me, I’m not able to decide when this serendipity happens.

Shouldn’t I be using good old paper notebooks, then? Sure, but my best ideas never come to me when I put my pen on paper. Somehow they just dissipate in ink. There’s something in the physicality of the act that chafes me, restricts the free flow of fast association, the connections between ideas that I need to see happening on the page quickly in order to fully understand. It’s also impossible to ‘edit’ notebooks efficiently. I see the forms of ideas and the connections between them as kinetic movements, and editing text on the computer lets me juxtapose things very fast. My notebooks look awful, are sometimes totally incomprehensible, and therefore defeat their purpose.

A smartphone, on the other hand, is a marvellous notebook. Some programmes have enormous potential: some of them are able to organise notes, chapter outlines, character backstories and so on by colour coding or a system resembling index cards. For me the most useful feature has been the ability to seamlessly edit and write new material anywhere and on any computer through a browser or a programme on my phone. I usually work in stages of drafts from notes and ideas, which are stored in various documents, proceed to more complete drafts on a word processor, then towards edited and revised drafts. If I am working on a literary book, prose or poetry, I have to see the final drafts in pdf format – like the final pages of a book. Being able to reach all these stages from anywhere and edit them anywhere has been a real blessing.

Most of my reading and all of my work now resides in the digital cloud. I won’t really miss the paper book, and I definitely won’t miss writing by longhand. It feels so wonderful that I don’t actually understand why people aren’t going around public places exclaiming in hyperboles about it like demented evangelists. It’s as if my ideas were existing in the air around me, not locked away in some notebook or a weathered old dustjacket, somewhere I can’t reach when I need to.

Like some constellation in the sky, my thoughts now move across the firmament, from where the influence and the inspiration of the gods descends upon us.

Sir Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke (1554–1628) by Edmund Lodge. Photo: Wikimedia

In November 1586 Fulke Greville (later 1st Baron Brooke) sent Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham a letter complaining about some ‘mercenary printers’‘ plans to print the romance novel Arcadia written by his friend (and Walsingham’s son-in-law) Sir Philip Sidney, who had died that very same year. This ‘mercenary book’ needed to be ‘stayed’, i.e. censored by the authorities, so that Sidney’s friends and relatives might take control, and also because publishing his works without consulting Greville or someone close to Sidney might damage his reputation or even his ‘religious honors’.

I rehearse this ancient tale because of its exemplary value for us today. From our point of view there seems nothing extraordinary about Greville’s actions: he is seeking to defend his friend’s literary estate from ‘mercenaries’ who steal intellectual property (IP): pirates.

But in the early days of mechanical printing, there was no such thing as a ‘literary estate’ or ‘piracy’; there were no agents, no concept of IP, no legal disputes waged over the control of an author’s oeuvre; authorship was not yet even a widely socially recognised category of real work, and copyright was something different altogether: an up-for-grabs monopoly owned by the publisher and not by the author. What more, there is no indication that Sidney himself would have ever wanted his works to see print (it is told that on his deathbed he wished for them to be burned).

So in actuality, Greville’s mission to end the piracy of Arcadia even before it had been published was a momentous moment, and the emergence of the pirate signifies the birth of the modern author. Although other works by Sidney were later piratically published, Arcadia remained (at least for a while) the property of those closest to Sidney himself; his sister later published his works in a beautiful collected edition, which paved the way for other, living authors (like Ben Jonson) to publish their collected works. In effect, it was a product of a new media technology, the ‘mercenary book’, which forced modern thinking about authorship and copyright into existence.

If you listened to the hyperbole of hype and the nagging naysayers last year, it certainly seemed like we were on the cusp of something equally new and exciting in Finland with ebooks. Many commentators painted rosy pictures of the future of publishing. Bestselling authors like Katariina Souri vilified the format and the pirates that would eat into their income.

At the same time WSOY, the largest publishing house in Finland, was in the middle of an internal power struggle between (or so it seemed) a market-oriented troupe of executives who wanted to modernise the business and the old guard with their more traditional, high-brow literary values. For some, ebooks became synonymous with this struggle, and consequently everything bad about the industry, and conservative aesthetes like Antti Nylén painted terrible pictures of a horrible future much like this one by the science fiction author Cheryl Morgan in an interview by the website SF Signal:

– in 10 years time the publishing industry will be radically different, and much more like Hollywood. The vast majority of book sales will be of a small number of titles that are incredibly expensive to produce, and most of them will involve celebrities in some way or another. What people understand by a ‘book’ will also be radically different. People will expect books to read themselves to you, and to have extensive video content. There will also be all sorts of ‘added value’ options, by which the publishers will mean opportunities for you to spend more money.

Morgan’s silly, satirical example of these added values is the ability to buy the same clothes or perfumes as the protagonists in your new ‘vooks’ are wearing. It might yet happen – but a few months after the launch of ebooks, what has really happened? Nothing. No one talks about ebooks now. It’s not even interesting as a subject in literary circles.

This might be because of the stupidity of publishers who were unable to capitalise on the launch: what we have is a classic case of too many formats and too many devices, with not enough titles and too few outlets; not one tried to take advantage of the new possibilities like embedded video or animated text; the prices of ebooks are still way too expensive, and so there is simply no reason to buy them. It’s worth a mention that some small publishers have even done the opposite. Instead of embracing ebooks as a cheap alternative, the poetry publisher Poesia has switched from print-on-demand and digital publishing (which it had pioneered in Finland) to traditional modes such as offset and even letterpress printing, citing as a reason the poor quality of pod-published books and the need to value books as works of paper art.

It could be that the real impact is yet to come. But even abroad, where the Kindle and other reading devices have actually made an impact on the industry (with large bookstore chains like Borders in the US filing for bankruptcy because of a huge drop in sales) bestselling authors like Neil Gaiman have done very well because of the new opportunities epublishing has allowed. Gaiman himself published his book American Gods online for a month, which led to a 300 per cent increase in sales.

Because of his positive experience, Gaiman is now in favor of piracy. For him, piracy is actually like lending from a library or a friend – and that, I think, is exactly what we need for ebooks to become a meaningful addition: a kind of electronic library and bookstore, something like the music service Spotify, where you pay a certain amount monthly and then can listen to as much music as you want to. I don’t know if that will happen, but what I find interesting in Gaiman’s case is that once again pirates are forcing a new kind of thinking about authorship and publication to emerge – but this time the pirate is an author’s friend, not his enemy.

Hulda knows what she wants! From the cover of a new picture book by Markus Majaluoma (see mini reviews*)

What to choose? A mum or dad buys a book hoping it will be an enjoyable read at bedtime – adults presume a book is a ‘good’ one if they themselves genuinely enjoy it, but children’s opinions may differ. Päivi Heikkilä-Halttunen reviews the trends in children’s literature published in Finland in 2010, and in the review section we’ve picked out a handful of the best on offer

Judging by the sheer number and variety of titles published, Finnish children’s and young people’s fiction is alive and well. If I had to describe the selection of books published in 2010 in just a few words, I would have to point to the abundance of titles and subject matters, and the awareness of international trends.

Since 2000 the number of books for children and young people published in Finland each year – including both translated and Finnish titles – has been well in excess of 1,500, and increasing, and this growth shows no signs of slowing down.

Little boys, ten-year-olds who don’t read very much and teenage boys, however, were paid very little attention last year. Although gender-specificity has never been a requirement of children’s fiction, boys are notably pickier when it comes to long, wordy books, especially those that might be considered ‘girly’.

Despite its female protagonist, Siri Kolu’s novel Me Rosvolat (‘Me and the Robbersons’) defies such strict pigeonholes. The book is an example of successful ‘branding’, a feature increasingly common in contemporary children’s literature. The manuscript won a competition organised jointly by the publisher Otava and Kinoproduction Oy, and the book is currently being turned into a film due for release in 2012. Part of the rubric for competition entrants was to come up with a pre-prepared marketing strategy and a brand that could be easily transferred to different media, principally film.

Young people’s fiction has offered only a pale reflection of recent debates surrounding societal and individual values; authors seem content merely to repeast the old clichés of youth. At their most interesting, young people’s novels have examined current ecological topics, as in one of the subplots in Marja-Leena Tiainen’s depiction of a young man growing up in the novel Päin mäntyä (‘Messed up’).

The unfortunate lack of interaction between young people’s literature and ‘adult’ literature is reflected in the fact that the adult author Leena Lehtolainen’s latest crime novel Minne tytöt kadonneet (‘Where have all the girls gone?’), and Anja Snellman’s Parvekejumalat (‘The balcony gods’), were lauded as being among the first realistic depictions of immigrant life in Finnish literature, when in fact the subject was tackled in numerous books for children and young people published during the 1990s!

Nowadays there are far fewer independent novels for young people: the majority of young people’s novels form part of a larger series, which may lead to a watering down of the intensity of the narration. That said, many authors have come up with interesting variations to the series format, good examples of which are Salla Simukka’s Tapio and Moona series (published since 2006) and Terhi Rannela’s Kerttu and Mira series (2008–10).

With the rise in interest in international fantasy literature, Finnish fantasy for young people has been picked up by several foreign publishers. Seita Parkkola’s Viima (‘Chill’, 2006), a novel for young adults combining magic realism and urban fantasy, has crossed the publishing threshold in the United States (The School of Possibilities, Sourcebooks Inc, 2010) and France (Actes Sud Junior, forthcoming spring 2011). Underfors (‘Underville’), a modern troll story by Maria Turchaninov, is a natural continuation of strong tradition of fantasy based on quirky and lively depictions of nature established in Finland-Swedish children’s literature by Irmelin Sandman Lilius.

The world of picture books seems rich and diverse: established illustrators Kristiina Louhi, Leena Lumme and Markus Majaluoma are all in fine form, and their success is helping many younger illustrators to come to prominence. The success of picture books can often be explained through the intensive collaborative work common to the genre: author and illustrator work together to create the best possible final product. The collaboration between Riitta Jalonen and Kristiina Louhi has continued since Tyttö (‘Girl’), a trilogy of picture books, with their new book Aatos ja Sofia (‘Aatos and Sofia’), an excellent example of the modern picture book: aesthetically honed down to the last detail, it is a work that transcends all age barriers.

*) Markus Majaluoma: Hulda kulta, luetaan iltasatu! (‘Hulda dear, let’s read a bedtime story’)

Translated by David Hackston

The curse of Kullervo by Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1899, in the Finnish Art Museum Ateneum)

A young man is born a slave under stars that augur ill for him. He is maltreated and betrayed from birth. He cannot control his physical power, his aggression or his thirst for revenge and, finally, after fatal errors and deliberate acts of violence, his remaining desire is to die. What, in the end, did life hold for him?

The cruelly tragic story of Kullervo in the Kalevala was largely the creation of the national epic’s compiler, Elias Lönnrot (1802–1884), who put together a number of originally unconnected folk-epic fragments collected in disparate localities throughout the north and east of Finland. This process involved many stages and went on for decades. The first version was published in 1835; for a shorter version for schools in 1862 Lönnrot cut the most violent and erotic scenes – including those involving Kullervo and his sister in an incestuous encounter.

‘Kullervo emerges as the composite embodiment of at least three traditional mythological figures,’ wrote the translator and scholar David Barrett in an article, published in Books from Finland (1/1989), to accompany an extract he translated from Aleksis Kivi’s play Kullervo: ‘the wonder child of superhuman strength, the wicked magician with control over the wild beasts of the forest, the tragic hero who unknowingly commits incest (Heracles, Dionysos, Oedipus). He can also be seen as the orphan seeking revenge, the slave who refuses to be a slave and as the victim helpless against a curse brought upon his family by the sins of his fathers.’

Kivi (1834–1872) took up the subject and themes of Lönnrot’s saga of Kullervo from the newly published Kalevala; he was also inspired by Greek tragedies and (Swedish-language) translations of Shakespeare’s plays. Kivi became the first notable Finnish-language author of plays, poems and prose – and after his untimely death due to poverty, alcoholism and insanity, he was pronounced Finland’s ‘national author’.

The plot of Kullervo’s story goes like this:

In a battle, Untamo defeats his brother Kalervo’s army. Kalervo’s son Kullervo, an unnaturally strong child, is born a slave, and Untamo sells him as a young child to Ilmarinen the blacksmith.

Ilmarinen’s wife, the Daughter of Pohjola (‘the North’) makes the boy a shepherd and bakes him a loaf with a stone inside it. Kullervo, enraged, takes his revenge by sending home a flock of bears and wolves instead of cattle, which tear her to pieces. Kullervo flees, and discovers that this parents and two sisters are alive on the border of Lapland.

He finds them, but one of his sisters is lost. Kullervo’s father sets him various tasks, but he fails in all of them. On his way home one day he finds a girl in the forest whom he abducts in his sledge and seduces. It turns out the girl is his lost sister, who then drowns herself.

Kullervo sets out to take revenge on Untamo, killing him and destroying his property. On returning home, he finds his house empty and deserted, goes into the forest and falls upon his sword.

Kullervo, Kalervo’s son
     snatched up the sharp sword
looks at it, turns it over
     asks it, questions it;
he asked his sword what it liked:
     did it have a mind
     to eat guilty flesh
to drink blood that was to blame?

‘To be, or not to be…’ Unlike Hamlet, Kullervo chooses the latter option.

(Extract from the translation of the Kalevala by Keith Bosley, Oxford University Press, 1989.)

Helsinki people on the big wheel: Linnanmäki amusement park, 1968

Photographs and excerpts from Helsinki 1968 by Claire Aho and Kjell Westö (text in Finnish, Swedish and English; WSOY, 2010)

A year that rocked the world: 1968. The Vietnam War, the Chinese cultural revolution, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, hunger in Biafra. Helsinki that year: a quiet little city, in a quiet little country. But Finland’s baby-boomers, born after the war, were now coming of age, resulting in the beginnings of a change of generation in politics; and the students of Helsinki University  joined the global student unrest of this ‘crazy year’. Photographer Claire Aho takes a series of photographs of her home town, participating in an exhibition in Kiel, Germany. Forty-two years later her photos are published in Helsinki 1968, together with reflections by Kjell Westö, whose novels are deeply rooted in his native city. Here are words and images of Helsinki that mirror the past – and the present

Both the city and its people carry their past with them, find it hard to let go, and don’t really want to. Many of us are reluctant to embrace the new. Hence there is often something ambivalent, something enigmatic in the frozen moment of the photograph….

Winter footprints: a snowy street

Is it just nostalgia when I wonder if, in spite of the fact that many of the ideas current back then eventually led to drug addiction, terrorism and  totalitarian thinking, that era was not the last chance for us Westerners to do something about our own lack of restraint, to change our lifestyle altogether  in a saner, more sustainable direction?

And isn’t it awfully pessimistic to think like this? The moral imperative for a change of this kind is even greater today: we simply have to achieve it, otherwise our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will have no future.

A clergyman is interviewed in a weekly magazine in 1968. The theme is lack of values and enduring morality, everything that was once solid and reliable  now seems to be melting into thin air. ‘The modern city dweller’s biggest problem is loneliness’, the clergyman says.

Fresh fish, good coffee? Business in the city

Forty-two years later, when for decades we have asked for everything and also expected to get it – more, more often, and better – over half of Finnish households experience loneliness, and it is even more prevalent today.

In a moving interview published in a weekly magazine in 1968, some men and women wonder, after being struck by misfortune: ‘Did we expect too much from life?’ As if Finland’s sorely-tried people still couldn’t believe that the emerging prosperity was real.

In the pram: on the way to the future

In Claire Aho’s photographs, the scarred memories of the old and the hunger for life of the young are both clearly visible. Now the old people in the photographs are gone, those who were young are growing old, and the toddlers of that year have turned forty.

The earth will soon have seven billion people, whereas in 1968 it only contained three and a half billion.

And Helsinki? Do we still live in a remote part of the world and the present age? Or has the distance disappeared?

Most of the distance has gone. Internationalisation began at a slow pace in the mid-1980s, but has since accelerated. In 1989 the Finnish Post Office employed people from twenty different countries. Today the company’s successor, Itella, employs twenty times as many foreign migrants, and they hail from 71 different countries.

The times may not always be what we perceive them to be, but one thing is certain: they change.

A spring weekend: Eteläsatama harbour, central Helsinki

The queen who chose not to rule: Christina of Sweden in the play Queen C (first produced at the Finnish National Theatre in 2003, directed by the author, Laura Ruohonen, with Wanda Dubiel in the role of the Queen). Photo: Leena Klemelä

Extracts from ‘Postscript’, published in Kuningatar K ja muita näytelmiä (‘Queen C and other plays’, Otava, 2004)

It’s hard to read plays. I was bitterly disappointed at the age of eight, when I hid in my grandmother’s attic and opened up Romeo and Juliet, a book that seemed to promise lust and appalling acts. But it wasn’t even a real book; it was just talking from beginning to end! Where was the plot, the action, the much talked-about love story?

It’s also hard to write plays. Novels and works of poetry are closed miniature worlds that invite the reader in. A play always serves two masters. It has to be open and porous to allow the actor and the performance to penetrate into it.

For that reason, it’s more vulnerable, it can be more easily distorted into something unrecognisable than the sturdier forms of literature. If you want it to last, a play has to have a strong skeleton that can always be dressed in new clothes as time goes by to fit the fashion.

But it’s hard not to write plays, too. At its best, drama has a unique capability of transforming word into flesh: to evoke a world with many diverging ideas and opposing impulses expressed in vibrant, densely packed dialogue.

My way of writing a play is like an ancient Finnish bear hunt: you need to approach your prey from several directions at once, surround it circuitously, creep up on it sideways, get close to it without ever aiming directly at it. That’s how you have to approach your subject, prowling around it, approaching at a tangent, until you start to understand what’s in it that interests you and how that could form the basis of the work as you write.
As a child I despised Queen Christina. In the story Tähtien turvatit (‘Protégés of the planets’) by Zachris Topelius [1872], she is portrayed as a spoiled princess who grows up to be a capricious traitor to her country, whose selfishness and vanity leads to the ruin of the nation and the death of great philosopher. When I grew up I started wondering what Christina was striving for when she gave up everything she had been born to: status, religion, gender. What made her abdicate her throne? To my surprise, in the broad field of literature written about Christina, I didn’t find a single satisfying explanation.

From Christina’s own writings a picture started to emerge of an ambitious rebel for whom the mere crown of little Sweden wasn’t enough. She wanted something more magnificent, and she wanted to acquire it by herself. At the beginning of Christina’s era, in the 17th century, an idea was emerging of the modern individual, someone who makes of herself what she wants to be. Centrally connected with this idea was an idealisation of personal freedom and independence. In my play Kuningatar K, Queen C, I wanted to examine a person who’s ultimate goal was freedom from all personal constraints, the most demanding of these being love, a person who was ready to go to any lengths to achieve her freedom.

As early as 1996 I wrote to a friend: ‘I plan to write a queen play. [The history plays by Shakespeare are called ‘king plays’ in Finnish.] The main characters are Queen Christina of Sweden-Finland and the philosopher Descartes, whose concept of love and equality will be one of the central themes of the play. [Descartes was invited to Stockholm in 1649, where he gave the Queen lessons in philosophy. He was said to have suffered from the harsh winter, fell ill, and died in February 1650. According to a new study, though, he may have been poisoned.] My aim will be to combine a poetic and comic-book style, with philosophical and spontaneously invented material, to create a play that will bring history almost too close and alive.’

But it was seven years before I finally got to direct Christina on the stage. Why? The most important reason can be seen in the structure of the text. I didn’t want to force historical themes that interested me into the disguise of drama, but I also didn’t want to give up my main character. Although the text loosely follows the events in the life of the historical Christina, it couldn’t advance by means of turns in the plot but instead by intertwining, multi-layered images and ideas.

The solution swam right to me. A Swedish field guide to fish fell into my hands – with recent research discoveries about the lives of eels. Modern natural science is still delightfully baffled when it comes to eels: the more we learn about them, the more mysterious they become. This primeval, mythical water creature, which is always changing its form and gender, was a door into Christina’s world for me. No matter how long the power of the entire modern scientific apparatus examines it, the riddle of the eel is never-ending. The same is true of Christina: the more I knew about her, the deeper the mystery. (Just a few years ago they dug up her grave for DNA analysis to make sure for the umpteenth time that she was a woman.) Among the aphorisms that the historic Christina wrote this one touched me most: ‘In every person there is a room to which only she has the key.’

Queen C (Wanda Dubiel, The Finnish National Theatre). Photo: Leena Klemelä

Queen C in its present form, having been produced in various languages and as a radio play, is above all about the tensions that are fuelled by the pursuit of freedom, by power and the megalomania at the centre of power. Christina is a modern rebel who rejects the roles of woman, mother, and female ruler that are offered to her, and instead lets nothing get in the way of building a new identity that shatters concepts of gender and the limits of acceptability, regardless of the consequences. What happens to a person who places her own freedom above love, loyalty, and friendship?

Translated by Lola Rogers

Ladylike: woman riding sidesaddle (Journal des Dames, 1799)

I have a friend who is an avid reader and who also talks about the books he reads. But being a staunch conservative when it comes to reading habits, I just cannot consider him a true friend of literature. The reason: he only reads non-fiction books. To me, ‘being a reader’ means reading fiction and poetry.

But increasingly it seems that real literature is becoming more and more marginal, whereas non-fiction (self-help, history, travel guides, popular science, popular economics, cookbooks) is what sells and keeps the industry afloat. The recent Finnish ‘essay-boom’ is an example of this development, with young writers like Antti Nylén or Timo Hännikäinen gaining recognition as important contemporary authors solely through their work as essayists; Hännikäinen has also written poetry, but Nylén is strictly a non-fiction writer.

What is remarkable to me is that only twenty or thirty years ago such a thing would not have been possible: essayists were not ‘true’ authors. That honor was reserved, mostly, for novelists (and perhaps some poets). Nowadays it’s not even the lowest common denominator, membership of the Finnish Writers’ Union, which makes you an author. Now every biographer and cookbook-writer can claim that name for themselves, and it seems perfectly natural to everyone.

How and why do people’s reading habits change? The American writer and essayist Edgar Allan Poe once complained that ‘long poems’ were a flat contradiction in terms, since readers could not sustain for very long the excitement which true poetry demands. ‘After the lapse of half an hour, at the very utmost, it flags – fails – a revulsion ensues – and then the poem is, in effect and in fact, no longer such.’ Poe’s essay stands in the middle of a sea-change in our conceptions of what poetry and prose properly are. Before Poe, lyrics (short poems) were only a minor part of poetry, with the epic narrative poem regarded as the most accomplished and revered form; after Poe, lyrics – the short, intense lyrical moment – are what poetry is: ‘an elevating excitement of the Soul’.

I’ve always thought Poe’s idea was at the same time incredibly daft and remarkably ingenious. At first glance it seems crazy that poetry should be judged by the fickle attention spans of readers; if that were true, advertisers would be the best poets in the business. But the real question raised by Poe’s essay is not whether short or long poems are better. What he does is turn our presuppositions about art on their heads: the success of art is not dependent on the qualities of the work of art, but on our own personal experience of it. Before Poe, this was not the case.

Of course, he was not the only one advocating this kind of idea. But Poe was the first to connect the reader’s pleasure with the reader’s needs as a consumer of literature: literature is a commodity which must meet the demands of readers, and these demands are based on pleasure and entertainment. In the history of literature, this idea has provoked a change that is immense, and we are still in the middle of it. The changing status of non-fiction is only the most recent phase.
What we learn from this is that the nature of things is not fixed. History changes everything. There was a time when no decent lady would ride a horse, or let her daughters near one, because riding astride a horse was considered unbecoming for women. And although some women of status, even before the invention of the modern sidesaddle in the 1830s, did ride horses, horseback riding was more usually a sport for men: in war and at work soldiers, knights, cowboys, fox-hunting aristocrats and couriers rode horses. Women rode in carriages, far away from the brute animals. But after the invention of the sidesaddle things started to change drastically, and riding became the hobby of women as well – and today, at least in Finland, horseback riding is something that is mostly associated with teenage girls: no ice-hockey-playing, sausage-eating, weight-lifting man will ever go near a horse, because horses are for horse-crazy girls, not men.

Surely the invention of the sidesaddle is not the only reason why riding has become a girl’s sport. Another reason might be connected with the way in which developments in technology effect cultural norms. When there were no cars, controlling the wild nature of a horse was a masculine job; when cars were invented, the ‘power’ of the horse was transferred to the engines of these new vehicles, which then became a man’s job to handle. Women were left with the obsolete form of locomotion which, stripped of its utility and power, became a luxury hobby first for upper-class and later for middle-class girls.

What do horses and cars have to do with changes in reading habits? Well, for one, the fact is that fewer and less men seem to read, and literature is becoming more and more a women’s hobby. Is the same thing happening to literature as to horses? Surely not, you say: that is completely illogical. It must be a coincidence.

But history is illogical. Most people, it seems, believe that the things of this world have a fixed nature, and that any and all developments in things like society and the material world happen somehow ‘logically’: that things follow their nature, an order of things, such as up-down, down-up; hunger-nourishment; growing up organically like a plant from seed to flower; growing old; or whatever process our brains and biology and experience of the world has taught us to expect, such as the sun rising every day or the idea that all swans and all lambs are white.

Sometimes politics, markets, technological innovations, reading habits and social customs such as marriage and who rides the horse change in ways which seem illogical or counter-intuitive to those who believe in the fixed nature of things. Suddenly a black swan sails across the familiar pond. Gay marriage challenges the nature of wedlock. Hard work does not pay. The evolution of life on earth, or the creation of technological innovations, or the growth of markets, is found not to be steady growth after all, but a series of reactions to catastrophes, short bursts of creativity followed by long periods of stasis – ‘punctuated equilibrium, as the evolutionary theorist Steven Jay Gould was fond of saying.We cannot see these relationships and the causal structures which control the world, because they are outside our brain’s capacity, and contemplating their irrational nature causes us physical pain. We mostly find ourselves reacting to stimuli, or going the way of least resistance, trusting routine: human decision-making comes after the fact, no matter how well we believe we can predict the future. We live in a nice little fiction of safe roads and gentle horses. This is why the recent hubbub about ebooks changing our reading habits, something I’ve tried to contribute to, is just that: a fiction. Publishers and the industry are terrified of change and seek to control it by any means necessary, mostly by inventing fictions of economic catastrophe, of evil pirates preying on poor authors. On the positive side, consultants, journalists and essayists, like me, find an exciting subject to speculate on (I admit I’m doing this mostly for the fun of it), and gadget fans have new gadgets to fondle.

Ebooks, and ebook reading devices, won’t change anything in our reading habits, if we view them from the perspective of Poe’s theory. To wax a little cynical, books are not art but a pleasurable commodity for consumers with short attention spans. The growing volatility of the literary market, the intensity with fashions change, is testimony to this, but the change which has made our present book culture possible has already happened, long ago. In any case, most reading is already done online; there is already more text in the internet than in all the literature of the world.

What ebooks might change, apart from the economic model of publishing, is our understanding of literature: we might come to understand that literature is not bound to books. Electronic reading proves that literature can be produced, accessed and used in more ways than one – and by changing the technology of reading, ebooks might just be able to make men read again, because using gadgets and mastering technology is what men are supposed to enjoy. After all, ebooks make things easier and faster: like riding cars instead of horses.

When we think of the future of publishing in these times of electronic reading devices, audiobooks, and the internet, when it seems as if the whole material being of literature is about to be transformed, we may ask how the marketing of books will change.

What happens when publishing goes online? How will authors cope with the new culture of the internet?

The internet is a place of fads: often silly, usually forgettable, but sometimes significant inventions and fashions which change the way we interact with each other on a daily basis. Many of these innovations have to do with communities: the much-touted ‘social media’ of forums, message boards, chat channels and the like, where news of bands, books and movies proliferate much faster than through traditional networks such as newspapers and television.

Because communication is faster, fashions are born and die much faster; the cycle of culture is speeding up. At the same time every dead fashion is piling up in some obscure niche of the web. Nothing ever really goes away on the internet. It has simply lost the attention of the general public. Online, it’s the attention that counts: how do you get it, and how do you keep it?

One has to ask how publishing will mutate in accordance with these new conditions. Will we find ourselves in the midst of a new kind of literary culture centered around digitally savvy writer-celebrities and their fan communities? Or will the internet become a vast graveyard of ghosts whispering about their 15 seconds of fame?

An example of the kind of authorial behavior that we may witness in the future is the up-and-coming generation of authors of ‘indie fiction’, such as the Americans Tao Lin, Blake Butler and Shane Jones. Indie fiction is not a literary school or even a set of stylistic similarities shared by a generation of writers, but rather is loosely attached to group blogs and internet literary magazines, such as HTML Giant (which is edited by Butler, the author of two well-received novels). It is an economic and material category: most, if not all, indie fiction is published and marketed by small presses such as Featherproof Books, Calamari Press, and Publishing Genius on or via the internet, sometimes not even in paper format at all.

But what is this ‘indie’, you might ask, and how does it herald the future of publishing? Well, it is, of course, a popular music term, deriving from ‘independent’, meaning independent of major labels, big money; an alternative to mainstream culture. ‘Indie fiction’ is therefore also a cultural category, and it is true that indie fiction has more in common with the mentality of so-called indie musicians and indie record labels than it has with traditional publishing houses and traditional literary culture – more with social media such as MySpace and Facebook than the institution of literary agents and venerable magazines like the Paris Review or the New Yorker.

As many indie fiction authors also seem to be alumni of creative writing programs, one could almost say: what art school has been for rock music, the MFA (or Master of Fine Arts, the degree awarded by creative writing programs in American universities) will be for literature (the list of significant musicians who went to art school and then changed the face of popular music is quite amazing: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, REM, Radiohead…).

What this means is that indie authors are rooted – unlike mainstream authors, who do not cluster around any such institutions – in the same hotbeds of alternative, twentysomething student lifestyles from which new trends in fashion and music almost always emerge, or which, at least, trendsetters scrutinise in order to find the new ‘it’ phenomena. But what is important is that they emerge independently of mainstream institutions, which can hop on the train only when it is already moving.

‘Indie fiction’ therefore means the subculturisation of mainstream literature: ever smaller niches for ever smaller audiences. This does not mean that indie authors are afraid to ‘sell out’, or that they will not also jump aboard the traditional bandwagon when it comes around. One could even argue that the expertise in self-promotion which successful indie authors accrue is an important skill set for their future careers, since it means that such authors have measured the mental pulse of their demographics and can speak to them on their own terms and through their own channels.

Take the aforementioned Shane Jones, a 30-year-old author who explicitly set himself with the goal of using internet forums to promote his novel, Light Boxes. The novel was originally published by Publishing Genius, a tiny press, and Jones promoted it on the internet by putting up a website, giving interviews to internet magazines, and by sending ‘hundreds of personal emails’ to his readers on the site Goodreads.com, a kind of public bookshelf for people who want to list and review their books. Since the site can also be used to find new books through your friends on the forum, after Jones got himself noticed by more and more people on the site, more and more people recommended the book to their friends.

Ultimately Jones’s marketing campaign was successful, since it got him noticed by the venerable Penguin, who published his novel, and also by Spike Jonze, the Hollywood movie director, who optioned the film rights for his novel.

A more famous example is probably Tao Lin, the self-appointed ‘it boy’ of indie fiction. Lin, who has published two novels, a collection of stories and two collections of poetry, is famous for using the internet in order to get attention for his work. He has, for instance, used his blog to sell $2000 shares in an unpublished novel, each of which would entitle the owner to 10 per cent royalties. This gave him wide coverage by the press in the US and the UK.

Lin is also known for sending relentless amounts of ironically self-promotional e-mail to the editors of almost every major internet magazine having anything to do with literature or culture at large – these messages often detail even his most mundane chores. At one point, Lin and (perhaps, since they all may be Lin) four other authors used Craigslist, the hugely popular internet notice board for classified ads, to shop for interns to promote their books.

But perhaps most famously, he’s claimed to have subsisted on shoplifting and selling the stolen merchandise on eBay, the internet auction house. But since the stolen items were corporate products and Lin used the proceeds to buy, among other good things, organic food, he therefore claims that the thefts were ethically vindicated. He later wrote a book, called Shoplifting from American Apparel, which, to my surprise, I bought from the Academic Bookstore here in Helsinki.

Such antics only work, of course, if the writing is good. And judging by Jones’s, Butler’s and Lin’s novels and short stories, there is good reason to take them seriously. Whereas both Butler and Jones tend toward the surreal, referencing magical realists like Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar, Lin’s work brings to mind both Hemingway and Donald Barthelme, writers of surgically precise prose, the one realist, the other fabulist. Lin’s writing, especially in the 2007 novel Eeeee Eee Eeee, combines these two tones into a voice which, when the amalgam succeeds, is at once funny, serious and absurd, imaginative and deadpan, ironic and minimalist.

The voice of these new authors, at its best, uses humor and absurd imagination to isolate and foreground the existential angst of a generation brought up with the bodiless anonymity of digital life, with text messages, chatrooms and blogs. It is a voice depressed by the narrowed experience of modern networked life in the blue glow of computer monitors, but one that is still yearning for moments of imagination, happiness and meaning – even if such things seem to be only the nostalgic phantoms of their previous incarnations.

Secrets: an illustration by Aino-Maija Metsola from Minä ja Muro (‘Me and Muro) by Mari Kujanpää

Books have a tough time in their struggle for the souls of the young: more titles for children and young adults than ever before are published in Finland, all of them trying to find their readers. Päivi Heikkilä-Halttunen picks out some of the best and most innovative reading from among last year’s titles

Nine-year-old Lauha’s only friend and confidant is her teddy bear Muro, because Lauha is an outsider both at home and at school. The children’s novel Minä ja Muro (‘Muro and me’, Otava), which won the 2009 Finlandia Junior Prize, provoked discussion of whether it was appropriate for children, with its oppressive mood and the lack of any bright side brought into the life of the main character in its resolution.

Literature for children and young people finds itself wrestling with the pressures of conflicting expectations: adults think a book is a good one if they themselves genuinely enjoy it, although children often have a much more uncomplicated, hands-on relationship to reading.

It is the task of the publishing marketer to target books to the right readers of the right age. Mari Kujanpää and Aino-Maija Metsola’s Minä ja Muro and Lauri Törhönen’s Sello & Pallo. Vaaleansininen rakkauskertomus (‘Cello & Ball: a pale blue love story’,Tammi) are good examples of so-called crossover literature, intended for a broad target audience.

After an era of taboo-breaking and angst-filled books written for young people, this debut work by  film director Törhönen, Sello & Pallo, is an interestingly odd bird; instead of the teen dilemmas typical of the genre, Törhönen describes first love with a giddiness that teenagers aren’t quite used to these days.

When it comes to fostering enthusiasm for reading, books in series are important. In fact, contemporary publishers swear by books sold in series; nearly 60 percent of last year’s books for children and young adults from the three largest publishers (WSOY, Otava, Tammi) either feature heroes already familiar to readers, or are the first book in a new series. Series are of great value in the beginning stages of reading, but they can also slow down literary innovation. Children’s books that can stand on their own, as they say, are rare nowadays. Picture books suffer particularly from the present proliferation of series. Finnish children’s books also must contend with entertaining translated offerings as they scramble for readers: recently, the successes of Anglo-Saxon marketing have been imitated – whether consciously or unconsciously – and in the case of quality literary offerings, this can be of benefit to Finnish authors.

There are more new young writers all the time, but well-known writers may also have continued success: the classic Selja family series by Rauha S. Virtanen (born 1931) is an unusual case – its first four parts appeared between 1955 and 1964, its fifth and sixth in 2001 and 2009.

The retro fad, with its interest in the lifestyles of previous eras like the 1960s and 70s can be seen not just in fashion and interior design, but also in children’s book illustrations, the delicate tones of the 70s can be seen both in the visuals and in the earnest didacticism reminiscent of 70s children’s books, emphasising such themes as severe parental neglect in Mari Kujanpää and Aino-Maija Metsola’s Minä ja Muro and societal breakdown in Seita Parkkola and Jani Ikonen’s Usva (‘Mist’, WSOY).

On the other hand, some of last year’s children’s books, and even young adult books, held fast to the idyllic, showing no signs of recent economic decline. In Marja-Leena Tiainen’s easy-to-read Maiju ja Bao (‘Maiju and Bao’), a Finnish girl travels to Vietnam, where she is shocked by what she sees and starts a philanthropic campaign. In Terhi Rannela’s teen novel Goa, Ganesha ja minä (‘Goa, Ganesha and me’), the poverty of India inspires the main character to sponsor a foreign child on her return to Finland. A sense of community is particularly trendy in young adult books – contrary to what you might have read in the news about school-yard bullying, friends in these books aren’t left to fend for themselves.

Folklore is used in books for readers of various ages. The Kalevala and other mythological subjects appear in Louhi, the adventure-packed final book in Timo Parvela’s Sammon vartijat (‘Guardians of the Sampo’) trilogy, in Reeta Aarnio’s children’s fantasy Veden vanki (‘The prisoner of the water’), and in Sari Peltoniemi’s Hämärän rengissä (‘The servant of darkness’), which is an imaginative combination of alternative history and fantasy.

Children’s literature was visible at the forefront of government literary prizes in 2009. Kirsi Kunnas (born 1924), the queen of Finnish children’s poetry, was nominated to the Finnish Academy of Arts, collaborators Hannele Huovi and Soili Perkiö were awarded the State Children’s Culture Award for their work in children’s literature and music education, and Maria Vuorio received the Finland Prize for the Arts.

The grateful frog: stories by Maria Vuorio, illustrated by Virpi Penna

But media interest in children’s literature has waned – it is mainly prizes, publishing successes, and film and theatre adaptations that are considered newsworthy. In spite of the increased selection, it is the rare children’s writer or children’s book that receives public and critical attention.

Translated by Lola Rogers

High-tech: the ultimate gadgets of the 15th century, parchment and pen. A portrait of Jean Miélot, the Burgundian author and scribe, by Jan Tavernier (ca. 1456)

The day will soon come when commuters sit on a bus or train with their noses buried in electronic reading devices instead  of books or newspapers. Teemu Manninen takes a look at the digital future

Most people interested in books are aware of the arrival of electronic reading devices such as the Amazon Kindle, a kind of iPod — the immensely popular portable music listening device made by the company Apple — for electronic books. For a literary geek like me, the Kindle and e-readers should be the ultimate gadget: a whole library in a small, paperback-sized device. However, I’ve been wondering why digital reading hasn’t become as popular as digital listening. I myself have not invested in an e-reader, although I ought to be exactly the desired kind of customer. After all, I read all the time. Even the mp3 player I have is mostly used for listening to audio books.

But the Kindle, and the other e-readers around today, don’t offer everything I want from a mobile reading device. A lot of what I’d like to read is still not available on them (say, digitized 16th-century books). The screen where the text appears isn’t as nice as it could be or doesn’t have as many functions as it could. Perhaps one of the up-and-coming devices like the Plastic Logic reader, a slim device with no buttons that turns pages by touch, will change that in the near future — but then again, my problems with e-readers aren’t exactly problems which the right kind of device will solve. They’re problems with a more fundamental level of the reading experience, about everything material about reading and literary culture.

These thoughts I’ve had about mobile reading are also related to the changes that are going on in the publishing world, where traditional paper media like newspapers and magazines are struggling, and print publishers are eager to come up with new business models. I find myself wondering what the implications are for authors and what they write — for literature itself.

One option is tenacious optimism. The science fiction and fantasy author Michael Stackpole recently argued that authors must take advantage of the new content delivery methods which digital publishing is providing them with. He is the first author to publish short stories through the iPhone App Store, the online store which sells applications, or ‘apps’, for Apple’s mobile phone, the iPhone. Apps are little programs that let you do all kinds of weird and wonderful things, like find restaurants and gas stations, log gym workouts, see where your friends are on digital map displays, and so on. According to Stackpole, digital publishing offers a chance for young writers to reach audiences and create markets for their work without relying on major publishers.

Of course, Stackpole doesn’t take the problem of quality control into account. After all, the ‘job’ of most publishers is not just to deliver content but to find the best writing out there; good publishers are also reliable critics. But he does intuit, and I believe correctly, that digital publishing is already having an impact on the nature of what we read. He cites the example of the ‘commuter market’: people who read one or two chapters on their way to work or home. This kind of reading, Stackpole surmises, could point the way to a return to 19th-century publishing models, such as serial fiction (think of Dickens, whose fame and wealth was based on serialised novels which appeared in literary magazines).

It is important to note that Stackpole is not talking about the death of the novel or some utopian future where we no longer have paper books. I think the dumbest approach would be to believe that digital reading can simply copy paper reading and thereby take over its functions.

Certainly, some new electronic publishing platforms like Issuu and Scribd try to mimic paper books by having animated, turnable pages, but I don’t think this kind of digital publishing will ever replace printed books, no matter how well they mimic paper on the screen. This is simply because they are already something else, a new kind of reading experience which is arranging itself around the idea of the book, but is also being interpreted through social networking media like blogs, Facebook or Twitter, where anyone can share their thoughts with a community of readers.

When reading becomes a part of a social network (just think of Harry Potter fans), reading and writing morphs from a solitary activity to a socially shared engagement: authors connect with readers on a much more immediate basis (through comments, for instance), readers share their reading experiences, write fan fiction, and may even play-act scenes from their favorite books.

So, there are all kinds of new possibilities for reading and publishing. But at the same time we are living in a world where traditional paper forms of publishing are dying. Some media ideologists, like Richard Eoin Nash, believe that this is a good thing. Nash points out that ‘reading increasingly is writing — readers are writing back in all sorts of ways, commenting on books, re-mixing books as in fan fiction, or creating from scratch, and publishers, rather than barring this activity, or hiding from it, need to embrace it and find ways to serve it.’

In a way, though bombastically overstating the case, Nash is right. Literary communities coming together and doing things seems to be the trend for many of the numerous book-related events and happenings on the net, from a community annotating Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook online to a joint effort to ‘map’ Thomas Pynchon’s Los Angeles, to a recent technology start-up offering a service for making your own newspapers.

With such community efforts we come to my central argument — it’s not (or at least not only) the well-designed device which will make digital reading popular, but everything it’s connected to. The computer company Apple is a good example. Most people know it makes computers, but in the last ten years it has been mobile devices like the iPod and the iPhone which have made it really popular. What makes the iPod and the iPhone so great? The fact that the iPod is easily connected to iTunes, the fancy-looking online music and video store, which also helps you catalog your music in visually appealing ways.

The iPhone, for its part, was certainly a fancy phone with its touchscreen and all, but what made it a hit product was the App Store, which gave the phone thousands of new uses in everyday life. As Richard Ziade, an American web consultant, has pointed out, ‘The iPod/iTunes ecosystem is testament to the fact that people are willing to pay for a quality experience, even if there are fringe alternatives out there for free… Content is part of the experience.’

Now think about it from this point of view: what makes books so great? Libraries and book stores, and beyond them, literary magazines and newspapers and publishers and critics and book fairs and book readings and everything that makes up literary culture. A book is never just a book, a mere platform or an interface; it’s a part of a reading experience which stretches out from the immediate moment to something more universal.

So what I’m arguing is that digital reading will become a success when the devices become not only screens that let you read, but extensions of digital libraries and bookstores and whole reading communities. The Kindle, made by the online department store Amazon, is certainly a step towards the right direction. It offers a constant wireless connection to Amazon’s virtual shelves, and its growing popularity is testament to my argument.

At this point one might ask why the ailing, traditional publishing companies haven’t embraced digital reading yet. One reason could be the fact that paper publishing is still tied down by its own material nature, the literary print culture that has developed around it. They cannot envision reading as anything other than paper reading, and therefore cannot grasp that digital reading is a different kind of experience, demanding a different approach.

As the author Seth Godin has argued, ‘the new business isn’t the same as the old business, just with computers’, and Richard Ziade makes the same point when he claims that in the digital realm, ‘the physical constraints of content’ which traditional media publishers still often cling to become a ‘nuisance’ for digital users.

To reiterate, in order for digital reading to become more popular doesn’t simply entail scanning books and making them digitally available on any device that can display them. It means that one needs to build a new way to interact with and experience content. As an example, digital music publishing has done away with the idea of the traditional album. People now buy individual songs, and make their own collections or ‘play lists’ as they are called. Here, digitality simply means the ability ‘to pick and choose’ what you want to listen to in a way which traditional, material forms of music publishing made difficult.

In conclusion, I’d like to come back to the idea proposed by Michael Stackpole: that we might see a resurgence of serial fiction in the future, because digital reading makes it easier to collect such ‘play lists’. Personally I agree. I’m constantly annoyed by the fact that there are so many good stories hidden in paper magazines which I either never see or don’t want to buy because the rest of the content is rubbish. A delivery system that would allow me to download stories by authors I like would be marvellous. If a similar service were to be implemented for poetry, I would be in reading heaven.

But I’d like to believe that the digital reading revolution will go even further in inventing new ways for literature to exist in the world; most simply I’d like to believe that digital reading will make literature more available, and make people read even more. Books are, after all, cumbersome, and we are becoming more and more mobile.

Again, this does not mean, as the designer and marketing guru Russell Davies has argued, that we’re in an age where books are about to disappear (although environmentally speaking that would be a good thing!). Paper and ink will never go away, but only change in function as they become embedded in new ways of being in the world. Paper books might once more become luxury artefacts, as they used to be in the age before printing began.

Mind-map: using the papernet to produce books just for you. - Photo: Brian Suda

Just as Books from Finland finally goes online, the brightest minds of the internet are forecasting a return to paper. In the first of a series of articles, the poet and scholar Teemu Manninen celebrates the second coming of the book

Last week I did something I’ve never done before. I uploaded the manuscript of my third book on to the website Books on Demand, an internet print-on-demand (‘pod’) service, chose the format (a large 19×22 cm size with a hard cover), selected a picture for my cover, copy-pasted a poem by Clark Ashton Smith – an American science fiction and fantasy writer – on the back flap and ordered a copy.

The project is a private one; no one else can order the book. You might ask why I would do something like this – however, a more interesting question, I think, is why it feels entirely natural and logical to do it.

These days everyone is talking about the way that traditional print media are dying because of the internet. But the internet itself has not stopped developing, and where it’s going in 2009 is surprising. The tech-wise and internet savvy are suddenly interested in plain old paper. What the most avid minds are talking about now is something called the ‘papernet’: the extension of the internet on to traditional paper media. But what would a papernet be like? Specifically, what would it mean for a Finnish poet working today?

Let me give you some examples. In 2005–2006, I became acquainted with some Finnish poets who were publishing their work on the web. Janne Nummela had been using search engines to trawl up bits of language from the internet to compose his imaginative, superbly funny surrealist collages. Karri Kokko had a project called ‘Varjofinlandia’ (‘Shadowfinland’), where he had been collecting sentences and bits of discourse concerning depression and anxiety to make a ‘confessional’ short novel. Inspired by these poets, I thought, could we go a step further and make the process of writing a poetry book ‘live’: an ongoing, public event available for comment?

My second poetry book, Lohikäärmeen poika (‘The dragon’s son’, 2008), evolved from a blog into a printed book published by Tammi, a traditional publishing house. In the process, many things changed; working with an editor, a graphic design department, and a publishing house with its own ways of doing things inevitably does that. I feel that the book lost some of its immediacy and resonance once it was taken off the net; it lost contact with the sustaining conversation that had produced it.

I do acknowledge the values of traditional methods of publishing. A good working relationship with an editor is integral for me, not to mention the resources for marketing and publicity, which the poetry scene, as a culture defined by an economy of scarcity, tends to want to downplay. Poetry is, after all, a bad investment for publishers. Then again, the amount of poetry this economy of scarcity makes available is only a tiny slice of what could be out there. Also, do we really want a handful of people (the editorial boards of publishing companies) deciding what’s worth publishing?

An answer to these questions came in 2007–2008, when the Finnish poetry publishing scene changed radically. First, the poetry organisation Nihil Interit began publishing poetry books with the pod publisher Kirja kerrallaan (‘A book at a time’), under the imprint poEsia. These books are available as downloadable ebooks or normal printed versions. Then the poet Leevi Lehto established his own pod publishing company, ntamo, with the aim of publishing more poetry than all the traditional publishing houses put together. The visual and conceptual poet Jukka-Pekka Kervinen’s Ankkuri is a similar company.

And then one day I saw Karri Kokko, who had made an experimental ‘version’ of his unpublished poems using the internet pod publisher Lulu. We talked about the possibilities inherent in pod publishing, some of these being rather practical, as in simply making a collection of everything you have written to take with you to readings.

But other ideas soon became apparent: what would ‘podism’, the DIY publishing revolution with its new forms of production, circulation and consumption of printed materials, really mean for literary culture?

Enter the papernet: the internet as a platform for producing, on demand, paper products (maps, organisers, notebooks, social travel guides and the like). Imagine, for instance, that your printer had its own email-address, and instead of your newspaper delivered to your door each morning, your printer would print it out for you. Depending on what kinds of feeds you are currently following, your morning paper could be a mix of the best of New York Times, Helsingin Sanomat and Le Monde, for instance. (And I’m not talking about the kind of printers we have now, but much better ones; ones that could print out not only newspapers, but paperback books or broadsheets or even glossy magazines.) Imagine, also, that books were no longer tied to the cost-heavy machinery of traditional publishing houses, which can only produce one book in one edition at one moment of time. If the audiovisual industry is already changing because of electronic distribution, imagine when the same thing happens to books.

Except that these things are not imaginary. They are already happening. Perhaps the most interesting is the current idea of the ‘unbook’. The concept was invented by Jay Cross, an internet consultant known for his work on informal learning and systems thinking, and Dave Gray, the founder and chairman of XPLANE, a ‘visual thinking company’, although both imply that they are only describing practices which already exist.

Whereas a traditional book is published in editions whenever it gets revised (or it has sold out), an unbook is released in versions (1.0, 1.13, 2.0 etc) which are never finished but always open to feedback from readers. Both Cross and Gray have written books by bringing the readers along into the process of editing their content even before publication. As Gray says, ‘the dialogue is critically important to the development of the ideas, and now that I have tried this approach I can’t imagine doing a book any other way.’

An unbook is, then, more like a community project between authors and their readers than the traditional one-way street of author->publisher->reader. Gray claims such a re-envisioning of the book-making process can change many things: ‘The author can engage readers earlier and respond to criticism faster. A publisher becomes an option rather than a necessity.’

It should be clear by now that my own unbook is not a self-publishing or vanity project. Rather, it is an un-book only in the sense that is un-done (I also happen to think that the name ‘unbook’ is a little too coy). What’s central to me is the idea of experimenting with the composition process, but also of taking more control over the material existence of what I write, of trying out ways of graphically representing my work in the best possible way. We writers aren’t usually very good at that; the history of the book trade is a history of outsourcing everything that’s material about writing to everyone else except the author. In the past, this has been necessary, because the technology simply could not be owned or mastered by one person. Now it can be, and you don’t even have to leave your house to be able to do it.

I don’t know if this experiment will lead me to new ways of making books. Poetry is, after all, very different from the kinds of things Cross and Gray are writing: books on visual culture and ‘e-learning’. Sometimes it seems to me that the most I might achieve is an understanding of how to design a book so that it can communicate something by its material form. But all this is so new. We don’t know where the papernet will go.

Sometimes I like to imagine that the papernet could represent a return to pre-print ideas of written communication, where important texts were compiled into ‘commonplace books’, or personal, annotated anthologies. They were singular objects made by their users to fit their personal needs. Text and authorship were malleable, pliant, and much more organic than in our time. What if the poetry books of the future were like that: ‘paper ipods’, or anthologies that readers could themselves compile and print?

Sometimes I’m simply reminded of the aura of singularity and originality surrounding authorial manuscripts as artefacts, something Walter Benjamin, one of the most important literary critics and philosophers of the early twentieth century, argued art lost when the age of mechanical reproduction began – but the manuscripts, I think, still retain that aura. Perhaps the unbook could be a way to let the printed book share some of the hand-written aura of manuscripts?

We must constantly invent new containers for books to burst out of, because they exceed their material form: books are never finished. And that’s a good thing for us readers.