The European Book Day project – successful completion in 4 countries
Four countries: Austria, Sweden, Germany and Romania met in 2022 their readers in Vienna, Gävle, Bonn and Cluj-Napoca to celebrate in creative and educational ways the European Book Day.
After three years, the project “European Book Day” has come to an end, successfully achieving its objectives to raise awareness and to promote reading books among the young generation.
The project results are joint efforts of eight project partners from Europe involved in adult education and promoting reading activities.
Reading is one of the fundamental educational pillars and books are valuable goods. The common goal of the project was the promotion of books and reading in order to strengthen the reading skills of young adults, maily of those coming from culturally and socially vulnerable backgrounds and also finding motivating ways of encountering the book for the young generation and for the EU citizens living in the partner countries interested in the literature of their home countries.
”European Book Day” meant for every country reading aloud sessions with authors coming from each partner country ( Austria, Romania, Germany and Sweden) who were present in each event and creative workshops around reading and books, flash-mobs and other creative activities to engage young people find in reading, an attractive and very important activity for their wellbeing, for improving their knowledge and imagination. Being able to read is the basic requirement for a successful education
“In Europe, more than 73 million people are illiterate – an alarmingly large number. One in five 15-year-olds has poor reading skills and 12,8 % of EU students drop out of school, which will lead to a 30 % increase in low-skilled jobs by 2020 (source: EU High Level Group of Experts on Literacy, Final Report September 2012). In order to address this educational, social and economic challenge, it is vital to promote literacy in Europe and engage all age groups with reading.”, according to EuRead.
The implementation of the project led to:
- a curriculum for the “European Book Day” – a comprehensive educational material developed by the project partners including details and practical activities to organize events promoting reading; the content is free to use by any interested party;
- four “European Book Day” events, organized in Austria, Romania, Sweden and Germany, which contributed to promoting literacy in Europe and engaging all age groups with reading. The authors that contributed to the success of the events were: Christoph Mauz (representing Austria), Jona Elings Knutsson (representing Sweden), Ion Andrei Puican, Maria Orban and Adriana Saftoiu (representing Romania) and Andrea Penkhues (representing Germany)
The European Book Day project is an initiative of Die Wiener Volkshochschulen (Austria), together with Echo Medienhaus ges.m.b.h.(Austria), Stiftung Lesen (Germany), VHS Bonn (Germania), Asociatia Versus (Romania), Media Partners SRL (Romania), ABF (Suedia) and EURead VoG (Belgium).
This project is co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union
The European Commission support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the National Agency and Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.