In a world dominated by screens, series, films and streaming services, books have to fight for attention. Audiences scroll, binge and skip, while reading remains somewhere on the sidelines, as the second choice. People love stories, but often choose streaming and blockbusters over books, forgetting how to engage imagination. That’s why, for the international BOOKtiga Festival of Used Books and the Poreč City Library, we asked ourselves: what if a library were a streaming platform? Would we then “watch” books more often?
That’s how the campaign Choose a book, enter the film was created. Instead of turning books into screens, we decided to use the language of screens to bring audiences back to reading. We selected 100 books from key categories and, with the help of AI, transformed them into blockbusters by creating movie posters and descriptive texts in the style of streaming trailers. But we didn’t stop online. Through these visuals, we turned the city into an open-air streaming platform. Posters strategically placed across Poreč became a network of “screening points”, where each location offered a different title. The streets became a curated catalogue, and behind every visual there was a book and an invitation to a personal cinema projection, inside one’s own mind.
On social media, we further amplified the experience through dynamic posts that changed according to audience votes in real time. Everything led to the Poreč City Library website, which we completely redesigned to function as a streaming platform: you browse through categories, discover similar content and vote for the book you want to “watch” in the cinema. And when the audience made its choice, we gave them a finale. The winning title, The Event of my Demise (Slučaj vlastite pogibelji) by Kristijan Novak, was brought to life through a public interpretation by actress Judita Franković Brdar, in a cinema hall. No screens. Just voice, text, and imagination. In this way, digital interaction received its analogue, human epilogue.
The results showed that books can absolutely play by the rules of the digital age: 13,483 website visits (+4x more than before the campaign), 8,697 votes, a 2.70% engagement rate, a sold-out cinema screening and 1,201 books sold, generating €1,802.50 for the library. By connecting literature with the language of streaming and film, we showed that books do not need to beg for attention. They simply need a format audiences already love. Because sometimes the best movie is the one watched not with the eyes, but with the imagination.
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