Link: "Iceland Reads"

This is a great piece about the happily literature-mad country of Iceland, published last July in Canada's National Post:

Iceland Reads

There may not be another country on the planet where books enjoy such prominence. For a country that boasts a population of approximately 320,000 people — that’s less than Belize, Brunei, and the Bahamas — Iceland is punching above its weight class. Its publishing industry cranks out roughly 1,000 titles each year (including works in translation) and the country produces more published authors than anywhere else on the planet, Brooklyn be damned. According to a report produced by a consortium of Nordic publishers, in 2012 there were 3.5 published titles for every 1,000 of the country’s inhabitants — a number double that of Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The average print run for a book is 1,000 copies, the equivalent of one million copies in the United States.