These include the ten biggest publishers, which represent about 80 per cent of total production. There are several hundred publishers registered with the Finnish ISBN Centre but the majority are scientific or other organizations publishing only a few books. Many of the major publishers have their own printing houses and are general publishers. In Finland the linguistic territory and the reading public are so small that specializing and differentation are difficult. Fortunately the Finns read proportionately more than many other people.
Print runs are relatively short, which presents pricing and royalty problems.
At the end of the 1960s there were about 750 bookstores and their branches in Finland. Fixed prices were abolished in 1971 and since then the number of stores has decreased so that by 1995 there were about 450 bookstores left. In addition books are sold at hundreds of kiosks and other outlets. Compared to the population, the Finnish bookstore network is still one of the most extensive in the world, although most of the stores are small. Roughly half of their sales comes from books, the remainder from other articles.