What is reading promotion? : A study of reading promotion projects in public libraries with support from the Swedish Arts Council

The purpose of this thesis was to study the view of reading and reading promotion that emerges in the project presentations from the public libraries that the Swedish Arts Council granted money in 2012. We also wanted to examine how the libraries worked on promoting reading in these projects. To find this out, we used a directed content analysis and analyzed the material with the help of two different theories, one of the views of reading and one of the librarians role in mediation of literature. We found that the view of reading in these projects emphasizes that reading itself is important, the content and how to read is less important. For the non-readers new media can be a way into reading. To create joy of reading was the goal that most libraries expressed. The work with reading promotion was all about new ways of thinking and how to find new ways to reach the readers where they are. The methods could be traditional, like booktalks, or less traditional, like using tablets or joining readers in the forest