Book Platform

Book Platform is a project of Next Page Foundation in cooperation with National Publishers Association (Armenia), Georgian Book Publishers Association (Georgia), Publishers Forum-Lviv (Ukraine), supported by Eastern Partnership Culture Programme of the EU. Book Platform was implemented between 2012 and 2014. 

The project idea is in line with the overall objective of the Eastern Partnership Culture Programme to support the role of culture in the region’s sustainable development and promote regional cooperation among public institutions, civil society, cultural and academic organisations in the Eastern Partnership region and with the European Union. The project's objective was to give a helping hand to the book sectors in Armenia, Georgia and Ukraine in overcoming the challenges that publishing, writing and translating face today.

Why Book Platform?

The particular symbiosis of culture and commerce is one of the key characteristics of the book publishing sector. The extent to which a given book sector is healthy is shaped by a combination of factors that involve the level of economic and technological growth and the existing regulatory frameworks but is also strongly determined by soft factors of human development such as literacy, education and level of citizens’ participation in public life.

As a cultural industry, a strong book publishing can be a contributor to national GDPs and employment rates but is also an essential prerequisite for the development of creativity, critical thought, informed public debate and - ultimately - for more democratic societies. Creators, producers and distributors in the book sector all over the world are facing the same challenges ranging from changing reading habits and competition from the mass media to new technologies and threats to linguistic diversity. In developing and transitional countries, however, these are supplemented by critical limitations in infrastructure, lack of adequate public policies and restricted language markets.

To learn more about the project , please visit www.bookplatform.org.

The Book Platform project is funded by the European Union and is implemented in the frames of the Eastern Partnership Culture Programme.