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She proposes a reading promotion strategy formulated as pact of many agents of the society instead of a Ministry program.
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Presentation with the main elements of the present policies and the new ideas for the next national strategy for reading promotion.
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The need of a new and broader concept of reading for the next years.
One relevant moment during the 2021’s edition of Readmagine was the presentation by María José Gálvez (Head of the Book and Reading department at the Spain’s Ministry of Culture) on her insights, ideas and projects for the reading promotion in Spain at this moment and for the next years. This occasion was very interesting because the Ministry was preparing the official launching of a new national strategy for reading promotion.
This was a great occasion to integrate three different points of view on reading promotion in the same session:
- Public Policy making: María José Gálvez (Ministry of Culture)
- Publishing industry: Anne Bergman-Tahon (FEP)
- Academia and research: Chistoph Bläsi (JGU)
Gálvez started with a straightforward statement: «Spain is a country of readers» despite the usual complaints and misleading information about the weak reading habits «Nowadays we have around 70% of people that tell us that they read regularly». During the last years the surveys show a slow but constant increase of the reading habits in Spain.
Next she focused on the 30% of Spaniards that don’t read and the causes for this detachment of books and began to talk about her programs and the policies thal Spanish national government is implementing: «We, the governments still have room for doing things through policies and we can influence on how we promote reading».
You can follow her presentation in this video. Gálvez defines There are three different lines of action:
- Structural policies: recurrent activities for the public services or in the field of audience development.
- Indirect actions: by giving support to the publishing industry and digitalisation of the value chain.
- Extraordinary and ad-hoc strategies for reading promotion: «Mesa del Libro» which is an open forum and the group with a group of experts that is helping the Ministry’s team to prepare a strategy for reading promotion.
This new strategy is not just a program from the Ministry of culture but a common undertaking: a civil pact with the aim to integrate many different initiatives. It is a pact instead of a plan, because it is something that should be implemented by a lot of diverse agents.
One of the most important and appealing remarks by Gálvez is that this ambitious strategy is based on a new concept of reading or, more precisely, on a new narrative for reading.
In this video Gálvez explains each of the different specific measures and also the conceptual framework of this innovative policy.
At the end of the video you can also follow the interesting conversation between Gálvez, Bergman-Tahon and Bläsi.
María José Gálvez is Graduate and PhD in Law from the University of Valencia. Since 2012 she has held the responsibility of being director of editing and training at “Tirant lo Blanch” publishing house.
She has previously been an advisor to the First Vice Presidency of the Government and deputy director of the Cabinet of the President of the Spain’s Parlament. She has also worked as an assistant in the European Parliament.
She has done teaching work as an associate professor of Constitutional Law at the Carlos III University of Madrid and a tutor at the UAC and UNED. Gálvez has also developed training stays at the University of Padua (Italy) and pre-doctoral research at the universities of Harvard, Pisa and the Free University of Brussels.
