Printed books are finished products once published. Digital editions, on the other hand, may have an eternal life as updateable items, at least as archives. Since the work on digital editions started in the different Nordic countries more than 20 years ago, a consensus or convergence of practice seems to have grown in the planning and development of digital scholarly editions in the Nordic countries (here defined as Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden; for Finnish editions, especially those based on material written in Swedish) (Dahlström and Ore 2013). Whereas it is possible to find some examples of similar developments in other countries or continents, it seems that there are remarkable similarities between the Nordic countries. In this paper I want to discuss what factors have contributed to this situation, and to illustrate them by presenting some fairly recent digital editions from Nordic countries.