Books from Finland - A literary journal of writing from and about Finland.

We hear a lot about how the internet is going to transform the reading and the marketing of books. But what about the act of writing? Teemu Manninen reports from the frontline of a new generation of authors for whom life has always been digital

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? More…

Father Christmas / Santa Claus by Mauri Kunnas

What to give the man who has everything? In prizewinning children’s author and illustrator Mauri Kunnas’s Twelve Gifts for Santa, Zac, one of Father Christmas’s little helpers, decides to give him twelve good deeds. Doing so is not as easy as it looks, however, and you can follow the twists and turns of the story on the Kidzone Finland advent calendar from Tuesday, 1 December, with one window opening each day until Christmas Eve.

Mauri Kunnas (born 1950) published the first of his popular picture books for children in 1980; entitled Koiramäen talossa (‘Doghill Farm’), it describes – with the accuracy of a treatise on folklore studies – life in a country farmhouse at the end of the 19th century. His hilarious canine characters, in more than forty books, have now found readers in almost thirty languages. More…

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. More…

Illustration: Joonas Väänänen

Just how ‘free’ is free speech? Pay a visit to any internet chatroom, and you’ll see. In the first column of a new series called ‘Journalist’s tales’, the media critic Jyrki Lehtola investigates intolerance on the internet

First there was utopia. Then came people, and utopia suffered.

As with all new inventions, from electricity to the atom bomb, internet social networks were supposed to make our lives better. They were supposed to give us license to network, to participate, to get to know each other, to get reacquainted, to flirt, to find an extramarital lover and to be connected to as many people as possible in as many inconsequential ways as possible. More…

So here it is, Books from Finland’s new website. From the decision to abandon print and go online it’s been a long and sometimes circuitous journey to get here – a journey that has been far longer in the imagining than in the making. More…

In this specially commissioned article, the first for the new Books from Finland website, Leena Krohn contemplates the internet and the invisible limits of literature.

Leena Krohn on the way to Cape Tainaron, Southern Peloponnese, Greece; this is where Europe ends. Her novel entitled Tainaron appeared in 1985. – Photo: Mikael Böök (2008)

The world wide web, whose services most of us now use for work or entertainment, is a greater invention than we have, perhaps, realised up till now: according to the writer Leena Krohn, it is nothing less than an evolutionary leap

Technology combats the limitations of our senses, geography, and time. The human eye can’t compete with the visual acuity of an eagle, or even a cat, but with the best telescopes it can see into the early history of the universe, with new electron microscopes it can distinguish individual atoms.

The human senses nevertheless have an unbelievably broad bandwidth. About a million times more data flows to our brains by means of our senses than we could ever grasp consciously. More…