WSOY regains number one spot in publishers’ quality comparison

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After two years, the number one place within the domestic publishing industry has changed: in 2011, WSOY was rated as the publishing house of the highest quality in Finland.
      The information is based on a quality assessment of the Finnish publishing houses conducted by Helsingin Sanomat.
      In the assessment the various publishing houses are awarded points based on received awards, places on sales lists, and volumes translated into foreign languages.
      In the calculated index, quality is measured by taking into account both artistic merits and popularity among readers.
     
Throughout the 2000s, the country’s biggest publishing houses WSOY and Otava have competed head-to-head.
      Last year the awarded prizes as well as the books translated into other languages carried WSOY to victory.
      Otava, in turn, sold more books than WSOY, and consequently it also had more volumes on various bestseller lists.
      Another change from earlier is that after a weaker year in 2010, Gummerus is once again on the rise.
     
All the Finnish publishing companies still share a common problem: last year book sales went down by 6.7 per cent.
      According to statistics by the Finnish Book Publishers Association, the reason for this lies especially in the poor sales figures of non-fiction works.
      Last year the sales of non-fiction were down by 8.7 per cent from the year before.
      The statistics only include the ten largest publishing companies, but the trend is clear.
     
The country’s bookstores were less affected by the trend.
      The sales of fiction even went up a little bit, despite the fact that the total sales edged down by a couple of percentage points.
      The difference between the figures presented by the publishing houses and the book retailers stems from the fact that bookstores can only include in their selections books that sell or books that have been published abroad.
      The publishers’ statistics include all the published books - whether anybody bought them or not.
     
In the conducted comparison, the large publishers WSOY and Otava were in a league of their own in terms of the points earned.
      A distant third place in the comparison went to Gummerus, followed by Teos, Tammi, and Siltala.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Otava comes first in publishers´ quality assay (27.1.2011)

Links:
  WSOY Foreign Rights

Helsingin Sanomat