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| Photo: Alison Griswold |
Every holiday season, publishers in Iceland prepare for jólabókaflóðið, the traditional Christmas book flood, inform Alison Griswold, reporter at Quartz.
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| A book shop window in Reykjavik. |
The jólabókaflóðið, in which Icelandic publishers release most of their new books in the months before Christmas, traces back to 1944,
when Iceland gained independence from Denmark. Paper was one of the few
goods not rationed on the island, making books a popular gift.
But
that tradition is struggling to hang on in the increasingly digitized
world. Icelanders aren’t buying nearly as many books as they used to.
From 2010 to 2017, book sales in Iceland dropped 43%. In August, Iceland Monitor reported that book sales had fallen another 5% from the same period in 2017.
“The
alarming profile we published a year ago has gotten quite a bit worse,”
Egill Örn Jóhannsson, CEO of publishing company Forlagið, told a local
news outlet, according to Iceland Monitor...
Last year, Iceland’s minister of education, science, and culture appointed a committee to study the state of book publishing in the country.
Source: Quartz
