Closely linked to the products and services provided is the spread of the culture and promotion of reading, which underlie the very mission of the Mondadori Group. These objectives not only form the basis of the company’s economic activities but also pervade the same logics of offer creation. As a result, they give shape to a great many initiatives, generally sector-specific or 160 specific to the Group, which aim to bring a wider and wider audience closer to reading and information.

  • the “Gli scrittori fanno scuola” (The writers do school) offers primary and middle school students video meetings with the authors, thanks to the collaboration with Il Battello a Vapore and Mondadori – Libri per Ragazzi. The project envisages the development of reading material, established autonomously by the individual Institutes, on the thematic areas connected with one of the narrative texts proposed, which will need to be read in full by the class in order to access the meeting with the author.
  • the Focus Junior, Focus and Focus Storia academies that each year involve hundreds of classes and thousands of students. The Focus Junior journalism academy, intended for first and middle school students – from which last year saw more than 500 classes taking part and more than 10,000 students – envisaged a cycle of three lessons dedicated to media education and environmental education. During the first two meetings, a simple, fun explanation was given as to how a magazine is produced, how an article is written and how to recognise fake news, whilst the third discussed climate change and the ecological transition. The aim of the Focus Junior Academy is to stimulate critical sense and supplement the knowledge of the younger generation on two topics that are today essential in the process of becoming aware citizens
  • The initiative “Alunni in libreria”that, for more than twenty years, allows bookstores and schools to collaborate in bringing the younger generation closer to reading and gain the loyalty of teachers and families. Through the platform alunniinlibreria.it, the registered Mondadori bookstores can come into contact with the classes to organise meetings in the stores. The programme is intended for children from nursery, first and middle schools and aims to bring the younger generations closer to culture, simulating them to become tomorrow’s readers and experience a book store as a place of emotions and discoveries.
  • The “Scrittori in classe” project, which stems from the collaboration between Mondadori bookstores and the Group’s publishing houses for children’s texts (Mondadori, Rizzoli, Fabbri and Piemme), which propose a selection of authors for on-line or in-person meetings in first, middle and secondary schools. It is a training path that gives the students the chance to take part in an important moment of cultural enrichment and dialogue, with the aim of enhancing the importance of reading and critical analysis of the text and investigating the topics discussed by the book.

Content accessibility

Furthermore specific digital projects were launched to increase the accessibility of the Group’s content.

The Mondadori and Piemme publishing houses propose (with the series Il Battello a Vapore), through the high readability books, a project suitable not only for those with specific learning disorders but also for all children generally finding it difficult to approach and appreciate reading. High readability books are intended for the age bracket of 6-10 years old. They are not texts with simplified contents but rather books for everyone, with graphic characteristics and layouts that foster readability and therefore make them accessible even to children with SLDs and SENs.

The Group also continues to produce its accessible eBooks, in line with the new regulations on the matter and in particular the European Accessibility act and certified by the LIA Foundation. Thanks to the new guidelines for the conversion of eBooks, starting from mid-2023, the Group has improved its use of HTML5 semantic tags and introduced ARIA roles to assure a better application of the ePub format, which has now reached version 3.3, on assistive technologies used by users with visual disabilities affecting their ability to read. Again under the scope of EAA regulations, a test project continued with one of the key digital customers for the display and recognition of accessible contents in a user-friendly format. The project will continue for the whole of 2024.