Projects Encouraging Reading

Reading is no longer considered a priority by the youth of today. A recent survey conducted by the Romanian Institute for Social Policies shows that 22% of young people have never read a book, while 1 in 5 people has read only one book.

România Internațional, 14.05.2014, 12:06

Reading is no longer considered a priority by the youth of today. A recent survey conducted by the Romanian Institute for Social Policies shows that 22% of young people have never read a book, while 1 in 5 people has read only one book. The fact that Romanians lack the mood or financial means to buy and read books is reflected in the book industry, a sector shrinking every year and raking last at EU level.

For this particular reason, various associations, libraries and publishing houses have joined efforts to organize a series of projects aimed at encouraging the public to read more. One such project, Romania, read me! was launched last year, given that in the absence of a national strategy for developing written culture, the book industry has been confronted with new challenges in promoting books and reading. Lucia Ovezea is the president of the Association of Book Retailers in Romania.

Lucia Ovezea: ” We considered initiating all sorts of activities, but since the ones who need to acquire the habit of reading are the children, we picked 4-grade students to take part in a reading contest. The competition was organized last year in 50 schools in Bucharest, in all the schools in Targoviste, as well as in Campina. What we did was to give the contest a national scope. This year the poor financing prompted us to let the Book Distributors Association, which is a member of the Romanian Federation of Book Editors and Distributors, take over the campaign. More than 20 schools in Bucharest will participate in this year’s reading contest. The awards ceremony will be held, just like in 2013, within the Bookfest International Book Fair due on May 31st. “

With young people nowadays spending a lot of time on the Internet, a young man from Cluj-Napoca, Victor Miron, launched a Facebook campaign to encourage reading. The campaign, called “Books over Faces,” is based on the concept of “selfies” and involves the making of a “book-selfie”, an image where one’s face is hidden behind the book he or she is reading at the moment. So far the campaign gathered hundreds of comments, photos and likes, and seems to be bringing young people back to book reading:

Victor Miron: “I managed to persuade a bookstore in Cluj, Bookstory, to give a 10% discount to those who have a book-selfie as their Facebook profile photo. This happened in February, and the news announcing the discount was quite appreciated. The first site that announced the campaign got almost 2,000 likes on Facebook within days. This means that people are quite interested, and after the first story was published, hundreds of people posted this kind of photos.”

After the Facebook was full of selfies of people reading, Victor Miron initiated other types of activities within the campaign:

Victor Miron: “Our intention is to put the books where people expect them less. We built some book shelves at a car repair shop and people taking their cars for servicing received a book, accompanied by the message that no matter how beautiful, a car will never create in a person the feelings a book does. A dental practice in Cluj Napoca has another interesting offer for its customers, in the form of a 10% discount of the cost of a dental treatment if they check in to the Facebook page of the practice and recommend a book that made them smile. So we do many unusual things to break people’s routine and make them think about books in a pleasant way and exchange ideas about books. We know most people respond well to discounts and even better when it comes to things that are completely free of charge. So we proposed the Cluj Napoca local authorities that on the first Sunday of each month, people reading a book on the bus don’t have to buy a bus ticket. The city authorities confirmed they wanted this concept tested at a book fair first and we soon implemented it on the occasion of the International Book Day. Anyone who carried a book had free access to the Botanical Garden in Cluj Napoca. The results were great. We made the announcement on the Internet and in a few days 32,000 people saw the post. We know this because they shared the image advertising the event. So 1,230 people visited the Botanical Garden free of charge, because they all carried a book.”

World Book Day, celebrated on April 23rd, has become a major event for book readers. Bucharest and other cities in Romania organized events aimed at promoting reading. However, a study conducted by the National Statistics Institute reads that Romanians devote on average only one and a half hour per month to activities related to theatre, cinema or art galleries, and reading takes them only 13 minutes a day. Also, the appetite for reading drops along with the growing in age.

Lucia Ovezea: “We now live in a globalized world, we have the Internet, information is widespread and there are many ways of spending one’s free time and expressing one’s imagination. Consequently, reading has lost ground, being considered outdated by many or even nonexistent. Nevertheless reading is still important for a great number of people in Romania, although their percentage is much smaller than in other European countries. “

So, television and the Internet have the upper hand, offering young people much more than books used to. The virtual reality has won over millions of young people and the only books they read now are those included in the school curriculum.