The electronic antiquariat

An increasing number of out-of-copyright editions of Nordic classics are now being scanned from the collections of U.S. university libraries and uploaded to the Internet Archive. Recently I've been looking at the 1901 edition of Arvid Mörne's Nya sånger and the 1903 edition of Ny Tid, both from Harvard University Library. I also found it interesting to finally read Mikael Lybeck's plays about Finnish fortune-seekers and European industrial magnates in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg, Dynastien Peterberg (The Peterberg Dynasty) and Den röde André (Red André). But if one looks further, both in the Archive and in Project Runeberg, there is now a very large amount of similar scanned material by Nordic authors available online, ranging from the works of Strindberg and Ibsen to much less well known names.

E-books in Scandinavia

It looks as though it may still be some time before the commercially downloadable e-book finds a secure place in Scandinavian publishing. The absence of Amazon from the Nordic countries (there is still no Nordic equivalent of amazon.de or amazon.fr) has meant that the distribution of e-books has not yet really reached the Scandinavian reading public. The tremendous amount of uptake on the Kindle e-reading device in the United States during the past year or so remains mostly a U.S.-focused phenomenon, and although the Sony reader has made inroads in the U.K. publishing world, with Penguin releasing a growing number of titles in the Adobe .ePub format, readable on the Sony PRS-505, it doesn't yet appear that these recent developments in publishing technology are reaching a wider European public, especially in the North. At the end of last year, Swedish firms like Atlas and Bra Böcker announced plans to release e-book versions of many of their titles, but on visiting the websites of these companies it's hard to find specifics or details, or even the e-books themselves.

It's possible, one guesses, that the concept of e-book publishing clashes with certain ingrained Nordic attitudes - and certainly the authoritarian trend noticeable in the recent Pirate Bay trial has given some pointers to this hypothesis. Although the outcome of the trial is still uncertain, the whole proceeding gives a good idea of where the priorities of Swedish and Nordic media content providers lie. Even so, there is one area of electronic publishing where Nordic classical literature has quite a strong representation: the appropriately-named Project Runeberg has been archiving Nordic-language literature online since December 1992. Like its larger sister enterprise, Project Gutenberg, it is largely a volunteer effort, publishing freely available electronic versions of books which have a cultural and historical significance. Nowadays it also releases facsimile editions of classic works, as well as sheet music, and Latin works by Nordic authors.

At Project Runeberg one can find freely available electronic editions of works (including collected works) by most of Scandinavia's major 19th century authors, as well as writings by many minor and lesser-known ones. The archive contains books by more modern poets and authors, such as Edith Södergran, Karin Boye and even Kjell Westö. According to the project catalog, the database lists 31698 authors, out of which 7746 have presentations of varying lengths. Although the primary emphasis is on Swedish, there are texts in all of the major Nordic languages, including Finnish.

One doesn't have to read the books while sitting at a computer screen -- they can be downloaded both directly and from one's PC to portable devices, PDAs and even mobile phones, making it possible to read them while one's on the move -- travelling by train, for example. I've found this a good way to catch up on my reading of Nordic classics, and I look forward to the day when I will also be able to read commercially published books this way.

See also in this blog: Old Masters