Why Nordic Libraries Are Free — and Never Close: Finland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden

From Asia, on to the Nordics

Last time I wrote about Asia's night bookstores and study rooms. Eslite in Taipei kept its lights on for a quarter of a century, Korea's study cafés grew 62-fold in ten years, and Japan's late-night bookstore came back unstaffed.

What Asian cities offered was time. Stay open until morning. Sell the seat by the hour.

What the Nordics offered comes in a larger unit: the place itself.

Free to enter. Nobody has to buy anything. Built as a national anniversary project. Open even in the hours when no staff are there. Holding books that will not be opened for a hundred years.

This time we walk through four countries — Finland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden — and ask what happens when a place for reading is held as public property.

Oodi in Helsinki — the country turned a hundred and built a library

We start in Helsinki, with the central library Oodi.

It opened on 5 December 2018 — the day before 6 December, Finland's Independence Day. That was no accident. Oodi was one of the flagship projects marking a century of Finnish independence, and public money from the centenary fund went into its construction.

Asked what to build for its hundredth birthday, the country answered: a library.

ALA Architects designed it. Three floors, 17,200 square metres, directly opposite the parliament building.

The other striking thing is how it was made. The library's concept was worked out with the public: more than 2,000 “dreams” were collected from residents, then shaped through participatory budgeting and workshops.

When it opened, the visitor numbers overshot every forecast. A million people within three months. In 2019, its first full year, 3.1 million came against an expected 2.5 million. Visits across all of Helsinki's libraries also broke their record that year, passing nine million.

In that same year of 2019, Oodi was named IFLA's Public Library of the Year.

The day Oodi opened

5 Dec 2018

The eve of Independence Day

Visitors in 2019

3.1 million

The forecast had been 2.5 million

Floor area

17,200 m²

Three floors, about 100,000 books

Its own website puts it like this today: meet friends, search for information, immerse yourself in a book, work. Open 8:00–21:00 on weekdays and 10:00–20:00 at weekends, with an Urban Workshop, studios and a gaming floor.

Finland's library act — “a free-of-charge basic service”, in writing

That “you need not borrow” is not a house style. It is what the law requires.

Finland's first public libraries act took effect in 1928. The objectives clause of the current act (1492/2016) lists five items.

1. Equal opportunities for everyone to access education and culture
2. Availability and use of information
3. Reading culture and versatile literacy skills
4. Opportunities for lifelong learning and competence development
5. Active citizenship, democracy and freedom of expression

It is the fifth item that makes this a Nordic library act. The purpose of a library is not written down as lending books; it is written down as promoting democracy and freedom of expression.

And the law states this as well.

Libraries are a free-of-charge basic service provided for by legislation.

Here are the numbers from the country whose law says that (2024).

Loans per year

85.4 million

About 15.3 per inhabitant

Visits per year

50.7 million

About 9.1 per inhabitant

Public libraries

706

Plus 118 bookmobiles

In a country of roughly 5.5 million people, more than 85 million items are borrowed a year. Helsinki's libraries recorded 9.3 million visits in 2024, up 13% on the previous year, and Oodi alone lent about 556,000 items.

Where the law guarantees the library as a free basic service, people show up. It sounds obvious, and it is the clearest proof you could ask for that the arrangement works.

Denmark's unstaffed opening — unlock the door yourself at seven in the morning

This is where the thread ties directly back to the Japanese half of the last piece.

Denmark runs what it calls åbne biblioteker, open libraries. For part of the opening hours no staff are present: citizens let themselves in, borrow, stay, study and go home. At the door you use the yellow health insurance card and a PIN.

It began as a trial in 2004, and spread fast: by 2012 there were 158 of them, twice the previous year's count. Some open seven days a week from seven in the morning until eleven at night, and eight were run entirely by volunteers.

Copenhagen tried unstaffed hours from 8:00 to 10:00 that same year, and more than 5,500 people used them in the first month alone. The record from the staff at the time: people treated the place with great care, and there was no damage and no graffiti at all.

It looks a lot like Japan's unstaffed bookstores. With one decisive difference.

In Denmark, in that very same year of 2012, the library workers' union objected. Lending falls during the unstaffed hours, they said.

Without the support of professional staff, the library sinks into being a mere warehouse for books.

Convenience expanded, and expertise feared lost. That both sides of the argument were recorded and debated in public says something about how grown-up this system is.

Dokk1 in Aarhus — a three-tonne gong for every baby born

Aarhus, Denmark's second city, opened Dokk1 in 2015. Its 35,600 square metres hold a library plus a citizen service centre, a café and an event hall, above an automated car park for 1,000 vehicles. More than 350,000 books and other media, open seven days a week, free to enter. The building has even appeared on a postage stamp.

Its emblem is the huge gong hanging in the central atrium: bronze, about 7.5 metres long, about three tonnes, among the largest tubular bells in the world. It is a work by the artist Kirstine Roepstorff, and it is wired to the maternity ward of the local university hospital.

When a baby is born in Aarhus, the parents can choose to press the button. The sound of it fills the building. Since December 2023 they can ring it from anywhere using an app handed to them at the maternity ward.

A new life is announced over the heads of strangers who are reading. The architects define the building as a third place between home and work; the idea is nowhere clearer than in the sound of that gong.

Deichman in Oslo — ten thousand people a day at the waterfront

In Oslo, Deichman Bjørvika opened on 18 June 2020, after a delay caused by lockdown.

Six floors, 13,500 square metres, 450,000 books, standing on the water beside the opera house.

In August 2021 it won IFLA's Public Library of the Year. After Oodi in 2019, a neighbouring country took the same prize two years later.

The draw is overwhelming. The city of Oslo reports 7,000 to 11,000 visitors a day; the opening target of two million a year was cleared easily. Its director, Knut Skansen, describes the core idea of the building as a safe and welcoming space.

It has 3D printers, piano rooms and podcast studios, and yet what it leads with is not the technology but safety and generosity — the qualities of somewhere to be.

Future Library — a hundred books nobody may read until 2114

Inside Deichman's new building there is a Silent Room. It exists to hold the manuscripts of Future Library (Framtidsbiblioteket).

Conceived by the Scottish artist Katie Paterson, the project began in 2014.

• A thousand spruce saplings were planted in the Nordmarka forest north of Oslo
• From 2014, for a hundred years, one writer a year deposits one unpublished manuscript
• Nobody reads the manuscripts, and the writers do not reveal what is in them
• In 2114 the grown trees become paper, and the hundred texts are printed and published

The first writer was Margaret Atwood.

The writers depositing manuscripts now will not be alive on the day they are read. Not one of the Oslo staff who received them will be there either. The readers have not been born.

Still the trees are planted, the room is kept, and one more year's worth is added every year.

It reads like a lesson that a library is a place built to carry time by the century, and I find myself sitting up straighter every time I come back to it.

Sweden's meröppet — unstaffed hours up, staffed hours down

Sweden has the same arrangement. Meröppet — “more open” — is the early-morning and late-evening access that runs without staff.

It started in 2009 at the library in Veberöd, in Skåne. The spread since then has been even more thorough than Denmark's.

Share of public libraries with meröppet

17%

As of 2015

The same share in 2023

57%

Already a majority

Growth in meröppet hours nationally

+56%

Over the last five years

So meröppet was not purely an addition to opening hours. In half the picture it stood in for the hours a librarian used to be there.

The warning the Danish union sounded in 2012 shows up as a real number in Swedish statistics a decade later.

Lending is falling. People keep coming anyway

Here is the other reality Nordic libraries are living with.

Denmark has 522 public library facilities (as of 2018). Loans of printed books fell from about 32 million in 2009 to about 24 million in 2018. E-books and audiobooks are growing, but the decline in paper lending is unmistakable.

Has the building emptied out, then? Exactly the opposite.

• Visits reached 37.4 million in 2019, before the pandemic
• After the dip, 2023 recovered to 31.1 million, up 9% year on year
• Events held inside those libraries in 2023: 30,300, up 19%

Lending down, visits and events up. What that describes is a move from “the place you borrow books” to “the place you sit among them”. Oodi's own line — meet friends, search for information, immerse yourself in a book, work — and Dokk1 being called a third place belong to exactly the same current.

When IFLA picked Oodi in 2019 and Deichman in 2021, it can hardly have been the size of the collections it was rewarding, but this redefinition of what the space is for.

What is left once you subtract the people

In the last piece I wrote that Japan's late-night bookstores work precisely by subtracting human presence from those hours. Seen from outside, Nordic unstaffed opening is the same subtraction.

But what remains afterwards is a different substance.

What is left in a Japanese bookstore at night is a shop floor: the ordered shelves, the self-checkout, the stock waiting to be bought. So the overnight takings are what gets questioned, and theft is what gets worried about.

What is left in Denmark's and Sweden's unstaffed hours is public space. Nobody has to buy a thing. You hold up a card, sit down, turn pages, and leave without borrowing anything, and nothing about that is a problem. A free basic service guaranteed by law simply stays open while nobody is on duty.

This is not an argument about which is better. The two subtractions point in fundamentally different directions: one is a commercial device for extending trading hours, the other a public device for not letting a civic room fall asleep.

Even so, the concern the Danish union raised was well aimed. A library without people drifts towards being a storeroom, and the fact that two-thirds of Swedish libraries cut staffed hours is not a development to welcome unreservedly.

Holding that tension in view, what Nordic societies really wagered was not architectural daring or long opening hours but the decision to take a place on as public property in advance. Building a library for the country's hundredth birthday. Planting saplings for unknown readers a century out. One decision at a time.

Korea, in part one, polished reading in the direction of showing it. America, in part two, felt its way toward stripping communication away. Asia's night cities, in part three, offered time. And the Nordics chose to offer the public-ness of a place.

One book in your hands, and the sound of a page turning

I love the time I spend reading, and I wanted that quiet presence somewhere in my ordinary days, so I have been building a reading space called mekuru on my own (there is an iPhone and iPad app too).

No progress reports, no completion charts, no social-media likes. Avatars simply sit down in the same room while each person quietly opens a book — a space made for paper books.

I envy anyone in Helsinki who can drop into Oodi every week, and anyone in Denmark who can unlock a library at seven in the morning. But short of that, some days I want thirty quiet minutes of reading before bed.

Borrowing the faint sense of someone, somewhere, turning a page, and slowly opening the one book in my hands. I would like that small luxury to sit right next to an ordinary busy day.

This series travels through reading cultures country by country. Next time I plan to come closer to home: online book clubs, and what to do when concentration will not hold.