Maxim (credit: Lima Andruška).
By Carlo Carrenho, Contributing Editor
On the afternoon of March 19 in Stockholm, when bookseller Christofer Brugge stepped onto the stage of the Maxim Theater, he was—arguably—the most important bookseller in Sweden at that moment. The audience had gathered for Bokbranschdagen, or Book Industry Day, the annual event that brings together the country’s publishing sector. Filling most of the venue’s 650 seats, they formed a remarkably representative cross-section: booksellers, publishers, service providers, printers, journalists, and even authors.
Christofer Brugge (credit: Isac Malmsten, Swedish Publishers Association).
Brugge had become a bookseller only nine months earlier—opening the bookstore Värmdö Bokhandel in the Stockholm archipelago with no prior experience—and was now at the same venue—then called Karlaplansstudion—where The Beatles performed a radio recording in 1963 during their first visit to Sweden. Unlike the fab four, he needed no instrument to make a clear, confident case for the future of the printed book and the physical bookstore.
“I felt there was an opening for the physical bookstore and the physical book,” Brugge said. He explained that he sees a counter-reaction to the pandemic, when many felt uncomfortable about going fully digital. “We want to meet people, we want to hold things in our hands, we want to talk. And in that context, the physical book, and the physical bookstore, work very well.”
Brugge’s focus, he added, is on experience. “My bookstore should offer something more than just the physical book—that’s the challenge for physical retail.” Competing on price is not part of the strategy. “To engage in price wars—that I can never do. I have to fight with other weapons.”
What others may be missing, he argued, is the role of the bookstore as a social space: “The bookstore is this physical meeting point; it is a place for encounters… being able to offer a physical product in a physical environment, and then loading it with an experience.”
Here Comes the Print
The Värmdö bookseller’s confidence in print did not emerge in isolation. Just minutes before his talk, Maria Hamrefors, chair of the Swedish Booksellers Association, presented the latest market data for 2025—figures that help explain the renewed attention to the physical book. Among the report’s findings: for the first time in the report’s history, the market share of print has grown rather than declined, reversing a long-standing trend driven by the expansion of digital formats, particularly audiobooks.
The numbers offer clear support for that shift. Overall, the Swedish book market surpassed SEK 5 billion ($535 million), with nominal growth of 6.3%. Inflation-adjusted growth reached 5.6% percent, bringing revenues to their highest real level since 2022. Print sales rose by 7%, outperforming digital, which grew by 4.9%.
Even so, digital remains a significant part of the market, accounting for roughly 32% of total sales, with print still representing close to 68%. Within digital, audiobooks continue to dominate, accounting for 82% of digital consumption, compared to 7% for e-books and 11% for foreign-language content. In that sense, Sweden remains, unmistakably, a country of audio—even as print shows new signs of resilience.
One important driver behind the growth of print books in Sweden in 2025 was government support aimed at increasing access to books in schools. Swedish trade media Boktugg recently reported that the subsidy was increased by SEK 304 million ($32.5 million), which played a significant role in boosting overall print sales.
It is important to note, however, that recent international coverage has sometimes overstated the extent of Sweden’s shift back to print. While guidelines for younger children emphasize reducing digital use in favor of books, older students continue to rely on screens for learning. The change is best understood as an adjustment rather than a move away from digital. And restrictions on mobile phones in schools, often cited in this context, do not apply to educational digital platforms.
All You Need Is Audio
From left: Jeremy Amsellem, Niclas Sandin, and Claus Wamsler-Nielsen (credit: Lima Andruška).
As much as the Swedish book market may have celebrated print this year, its gravitational pull still points toward digital audio.
After all, just over 61% of all book units sold in Sweden in 2025 were audiobooks, and in fiction the format is now dominant, with a 54% share of publisher revenues. It was therefore no surprise that one of the most anticipated panels of the day focused on audiobooks, bringing together Spotify alongside Swedish audiobook companies BookBeat and Storytel.
Unsurprisingly, the arrival of Spotify was at the center of the discussion—and notably, not as a threat.
“We’ve been able to show that we can be complementary to the market… able to grow the market,” said Jeremy Amsellem, Audiobook Partnerships and Licensing Manager at Spotify, pointing to new audiences, particularly male listeners and nonfiction readers.
Storytel’s Chief Commercial Officer Claus Wamsler-Nielsen agreed. “The more competition that there is in the market, the faster the market will develop.”
And BookBeat CEO Niclas Sandin pushed back against a competitive framing of the market: “You shouldn’t end up in a zero-sum game mindset… we can help each other to reach those [new audiences], he said.”
That same tone carried into the question of whether the audiobook market is reaching saturation. “I think it’s far from the peak,” Sandin said, noting that even with around one million paying users, “it’s a pretty low bar for where we can go.” Wamsler-Nielsen echoed that sentiment, describing audiobooks as “still a niche market” in the Nordics, with significant room for further growth.
On business models, however, the panel revealed different strategies among the three companies.
“We dropped… our all-you-can-eat accounts back in 2022,” Sandin said, emphasizing BookBeat’s shift toward tiered subscriptions. Spotify, by contrast, operates with a capped model, “twelve hours per month… equivalent to one book or more”—with paid top-ups for heavier users. Storytel, of course, still offers an unlimited model.
Finally, on exclusivity, there was broad alignment—at least in principle.
“We are not willing… to play that game,” Amsellem said, signaling that books should be widely available across platforms. Sandin was even more direct: “The only thing it leads to is fewer people listening… and the long-term relevance of that author will be a lot lower.”
Storytel, which has a strong “originals” strategy, while aligned in general, struck a more nuanced note.
“In general, I agree with you guys,” Wamsler-Nielsen said. He also defended “exclusive windows” and premieres as a way to give content a stronger push.
Looking ahead, Amsellem pointed to what could become a key development: “Maybe next year we will talk about industry statistics with Spotify sales,” adding that the company was discussing how to make that happen.
Can’t Price Me Love
As the program approached its final stretch—and with some in the audience already glancing ahead to the happy hour that would follow—attention turned to a topic that rarely fails to spark strong opinions in publishing: fixed book pricing.
Alexander Even Henriksen, CEO of Bonnier Norsk Forlag, offered a notably balanced presentation of the Norwegian model, outlining both its strengths and its shortcomings. While fixed pricing has long existed in Norway as an industry agreement between publishers and booksellers, it only became formalized into law on January 1, 2024, giving the model a new regulatory foundation.
Bonnier Books CEO Håkan Rudels (credit: Isac Malmsten, Swedish Publishers Association).
At its core, Norway’s model is built on a fixed retail price set by the publisher, maintained for one year across all formats. This applies not only to print but also to digital formats: during the fixed-price period, e-books and audiobooks must be sold as individual copies and cannot enter subscription streaming services until that period expires. The system aims to protect diversity, ensure nationwide access, and support a dense network of physical bookstores.
Henriksen suggested some skepticism about its overall impact of the system but stopped short of dismissing it. “It is a response to something,” he said. “I’m just not entirely sure what question it is a response to,” he added, drawing laughs from the audience. He pointed to Norway’s unusually high number of physical bookstores—roughly one per 11,000 inhabitants—as evidence that the model does support retail presence, while questioning whether it truly increases reading and access to literature.
Perhaps the most striking trade-off, he suggested, lies in the relationship with digital formats. Because new titles cannot enter streaming services immediately, “we lose relevance in the channels where new readers and listeners are actually found,” he said. The result, paradoxically, is that Norwegian-language titles are held back from digital discovery, while English-language content—unrestricted by the same rules—gains ground.
If Henriksen’s presentation brought nuance to the debate, the reaction from Bonnier Books CEO Håkan Rudels added a more pragmatic—and at times skeptical—industry perspective in a conversation that followed.
His main concern was not fixed pricing itself, but how regulation interacts with the digital market. In Norway, where such restrictions delay entry into subscription-based streaming services, he was openly critical. “It’s very strange that the state should decide when something is released in which format,” he said, comparing the system to forcing newspapers to publish in print before going online.
Rudels also challenged the idea that fixed pricing leads to greater diversity and decentralization. In practice, he argued, concentration remains.
“Amazon is still the largest bookseller in Germany despite fixed prices,” he said, observing that in Norway, too, the market is dominated by a small number of major groups. If anything, he suggested that the clearest effect of fixed pricing is to support physical bookstores. “If that’s the goal—fine,” he said. But it was not a model he would advocate importing into Sweden, which abandoned fixed prices decades ago in favor of free pricing.
His conclusion was disarmingly direct. “If we need to let publishers set the prices, we can do that,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a huge issue… I just think it’s boring.”
The End
The discussion on fixed pricing was followed by a brief shift in tone, as author Kristina Ohlsson took the stage—an elegant reminder that, beyond models and market structures, books still begin with writers. Soon after, the audience moved on to what Swedes perhaps do best at industry events: mingle—that uniquely Scandinavian form of semi-structured socializing where conversations, deals, and opinions flow as long as the wine does.
At that festive moment, one could not help but wonder whether, somewhere in that room, Christofer Brugge—the bookseller who had taken center stage earlier in the day—might have entertained a quiet thought: what if, in the fight for book buyers, prices were removed from the battlefield altogether? After all, he seems to be doing just fine with his own weapons of choice.