Saturday essay The death of a printed book worries those most accustomed to receiving novelties for free

Dozens dark portraits of writers look at a visitor in the lobby of WSOY’s old headquarters on Porvoo’s Mannerheiminkatu. The company moved its management to Helsinki as early as 1930, but an office was needed Söderström even at the birthplace of the family, as it was not until the 1970s that the number of employees in the company peaked in Porvoo: the book factory employed as many as more than a thousand people.

One WSOY employee now works in the largest building in the Porvoo nuclear blocks. Archivist. In the fall of 2018, his shelves were removed 13.5 tons of books for Helsinki’s antique shop.

This shrine of Finnish literary activity has become an office hotel. In the lobby you can sense the time when reading was honored and world books in order. The portraits framed on the panel wall stare at the visitor with a serious look From Runeberg and About Topelius from.

WSOY’s past is victorious, as it is in other publishing houses. If the portraits did not also have an autograph, I might assume that some of the top-row razors would be Matthew and Lukewho draw up About Jesus still very popular biofiction today To the Bible.

There is nothing new under the sun, like The Book of Ecclesiastes first In the Old Testament and Mika Waltari then In you lined up. Even in the literature, everything has already been done and seen for its participants, but it must be done again so that it does not die out completely.

Next to the front door of Mannerheiminkatu, the youngest faces of the publishing house look at their true predecessors with a slightly more relaxed look. Time seems to have stalled in the early 1980s: Juhani Peltonen, Tove Jansson, Arto Paasilinna, Eeva Kilpi, Joni Skiftesvik and Mirkka Rekola.

Eve and Joni are still alive.

Coming soon in the book Reading timea (Siltala) Chief Librarian retired from the National Library Kai Ekholm and a statistician Yrjö Repo are afraid of the disappearance of the printed book. The former yells at others to wake up to the danger of digitalization and entertainment stifled by electronic means: the ability to concentrate is ruined, which means the depletion of man.

The road, paved with computer search and reading time services, leads in a twin-drawn nightmare to the withering away of a civilized state and the destruction of democracy, with the crowd capturing online evidence alone shouting bells at populists offering easy solutions to society’s difficult problems.

The nightmare is reportedly not a matter of perspective but of displayable numbers. They are downloaded by Yrjö Repo in his own part for almost a hundred pages with the title What do the statistics say about literature and reading?

The figures are not nasty at all, which, however, more miraculously did not obscure the agenda of the opus.

I have to say that: if the future of reading printed books depended on this novelty, even the last reading lamp would go out tomorrow. For the repetition, the rainfall of numbers, and the outrageous arrogance towards entertainment make it almost unbearable to read.

Stubborn however, despite opposition to the inevitable change, there is a necessary controversy in the hands of the book business’s broad smiles in the book business, caused by the decade-long downward trend of ten years turning into a brisk upturn in pandemic isolation. The nation missed stories.

Ekholm launches the concept of “transition reading”. It means moving users from a typed word to reading or listening online – and it is While reading according to the one-time final doomsday going now.

The harshest of the numbers excavated by Revo is that the number of people who have completely dropped out of cultural hobbies is growing rapidly, and at least the number of active purchasers and readers of books is not increasing. Ekholm concludes that our society may be severely differentiated. Rip.

“An author needs a publisher, but a publisher doesn’t need an author, it can buy its content wherever it wants, focus on foreign licenses, make quick books about pop-up dogs, cats, Waterfallcharacters and other influencers and accompanying cookbooks every week of the year and ensures their own income accumulation, ”he bangs. And continue:

“It doesn’t matter to the retailer whose faces are on the covers of the book, as long as those faces are identified on television, media or entertainment and the books disappear from the shelf.”

The old angry man escalates, definitely.

But not outrageously. I can’t remember the personification of Otava’s precious traditions Heikki A. Reenpää had just been buried last year, when the book market leader had already set fire to radio sound and television Sami Kurosen aloud with readings lightly hot With sensual evening tales.

I guess the side will turn heavily in Hietaniemi. Comrade Veijo At sea also.

Times are changing, and it is bad for the Sanoma company, which is responsible for producing the contents of many varieties, to throw stones at the tops of other actors. Large corporations need to appeal to the masses to keep a large ship in motion.

And not an evil word about eroticism per se.

Heikki A., who lived to be 98 years old, belonged to an era when the publisher lived with his author, which meant, among other things, that even poorer performances that fit the holidays of good manuscripts could enter the printing press.

There is only one such relationship left in this country. Since 1971, Otava has published From Antti Tuuri with a few exceptions every year a book or a couple. If Tuuri ever languishes, the era will end.

I took the next book, General Paavo Talvelan although the biography is published by Siltala, even these days, a text from the hard-working Ostrobothnian has been enough for others other than Otava.

From the old WSOY The last machines from the huge printing hall in Tarmola, Porvoo, were sold abroad more than a year ago.

Now the padel is being played in the hall. It’s a good hobby.

After all, reading – from a printed page, a screen, or both – doesn’t necessarily make anyone a better person, even if it While reading activates brain activity.

He had certainly also been activated by the poet, university man and psychiatrist whom Pen, the international organization for freedom of expression, recommended from its London headquarters to the Finnish branch as an adoption member as Yugoslavia, which consisted of six so-called republics, was coming to an end. Serbian nationalist opinions caused inconvenience to the man, London was informed.

Nowadays Radovan Karadzic is a life prisoner for the genocide and ethnic cleansing in the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

I’m afraid that the most worried about the death of a printed book are those who are used to getting them for free.

Like me, for example.

So there’s no way I can call on clickers, listeners, or a government that makes its mark on peat production instead of a printed book when I don’t even pay clear money for my traditional delicacy.

Even if I paid, no new writer portraits would appear on the paneled walls of the valuable lobbies. Book when you no longer need a house around but live anywhere.

Many of the novelties this fall will be delayed from the planned release schedule due to problems with the printing presses. Reading Time will be completed on October 25th.