Finland proposes a very novel idea — invest in the public library

Times

4 hours ago

In the €100 million Oodi library, which looms over central Helsinki like a cruise ship from the future, robots called Tatu, Patu and Veera trundle back and forth between the shelves and the reading rooms.
Against this backdrop, foreign visitors might be surprised to see how many children and teenagers are engaged in an almost unsettlingly archaic activity: reading and borrowing books.
In the age of TikTok, Netflix and Candy Crush, it is not just Finland's public libraries that are booming, but also demand for their physical paperbacks and hardbacks.
Last year the average Finn visited them nine times and borrowed 15 books, resulting in the highest lending figures for 20 years.
The appetite for children's and young adults' literature has risen to a record for the third year in a row, with a total of 38 million loans in 2024. That works out at about 40 books or other pieces of material, such as audiobooks, for each person under the age of 18.
In Helsinki, the capital, which has a population of about 690,000, there were 9.2 million library visits and 5.7 million loans.
Even by the standards of a country that is often ranked as the most literate on the planet, the numbers are remarkable. In Britain, the total number of loans has fallen to less than half of what it was at the turn of the millennium, despite a tentative recovery in the wake of the pandemic, and about 40 libraries a year are closing.
Visits to German public libraries are still about a fifth lower than they were before the advent of Covid-19 and about one in five of them has shut down over the past decade.
The most obvious explanation for the phenomenon is that Finland values its libraries and invests accordingly.
The state spends about €60 per capita on the public library system each year, approximately four times as much as the UK and six times as much as Germany.
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Where other countries rely on corporate skyscrapers or shopping centres for their visions of architectural modernity, Finland often looks to its libraries, such as Oodi and Vallila in Helsinki, the main Metso library in Tampere, or the revered 20th-century designer Alvar Aalto's projects in Rovaniemi and Seinajoki.
They have traditionally served as engines of social mobility and integration. Erkki Sevanen, professor of literature at the University of Eastern Finland, grew up in a working-class family in Eura, a thinly populated district of villages 110 miles to the northwest of Helsinki.
'My parents and relatives did not used to read books, but there was a fine and well-equipped public library in our home village,' he said. 'It opened a whole world of classical literature and philosophy for me in the 1960s and 1970s.'
Sevanen said the public libraries were a significant part of the reason he had ultimately pursued a university career, and that today they perform a similar function for immigrants to Finland.
'I am very grateful to this system,' he said. 'It was part of what made my social rise from the working class to academic circles possible.'
The roots of this culture predate Finland's independence in 1918. Like large parts of Scandinavia and continental northern Europe, it was profoundly influenced by Lutheran Protestantism and its insistence that each individual should engage with the texts of scripture for themselves.
'The ability to read was a requirement for everyone who wanted to get married. To demonstrate their reading skills, people were tested at church gatherings,' said Ulla Richardson, professor of technology-enhanced language learning at the University of Jyvaskyla.
The movement gathered steam in the 19th century, when Finland was a semi-autonomous duchy in the Russian empire and the new public libraries were focal points for an emerging sense of national identity.
They remain important hubs for Finnish society, providing a space in which people can be alone and together at the same time. 'Many Finns tend to consider libraries almost as sanctuaries,' Richardson said.
Alongside computers and internet access, they offer board games, video games, musical instruments, sewing machines, seasonal theatre passes and even sports equipment in some cases. These services are particularly valued by families with straitened financial means, who might not otherwise be able to afford school textbooks or other media.
'The libraries are spaces that children and teens can access freely, especially if they don't have other places to go,' said Richardson. 'These days we also have self-service libraries open when there are no personnel working.'