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Hunt for codes and read bestselling books for free!

We cannot imagine summer without sunshine, sunbathing and the sound of the sea, but can we imagine a perfect holiday without a good read? Here comes an excellent opportunity to all who love reading but could not find enough room to fit bulky volumes in their hand luggage. Thanks to the Czytaj KRK! mobile application, readers will be able to borrow the latest and bestselling e-books from the major Polish publishers for free and use them on their mobile phones! In the city, in the mountains, or on the beach – from now on the most interesting books will be always close  at hand. Ten various titles will be made available to readers during each of the three editions of the campaign this year. The August e-bookshelf will be filled with bestsellers of such authors as Ignacy Karpowicz, Stanisław Lem, Binyavanga Wainaina, Dmitry Glukhovsky, and Michelle Corasanti. Czytaj KRK! is a joint project of the Krakow Festival Office and Woblink, a Polish leading e-book platform.

This is the first action of this kind in the world – we have created a mobile application and we give readers completely free access to books. These are not items from the school list of public domain, but bestsellers and the latest titles. I am truly glad to say that no one before us has acted on such a scale – says the Director of the Krakow Festival Office, Izabela Helbin.

This year’s campaign will be divided into three rounds – in August, in October, and at the end of November and the beginning of December. During each edition, the users who download the Czytaj KRK! app will be able to scan a code from a poster, citylight, or another vector, and borrow the available full-version e-books, which will mostly include the latest and bestselling titles of the largest publishers in Poland. The free Czytaj KRK! application can be found on App Store and Google Play. Start looking for the QR codes in Krakow from tomorrow!

The project is designed as an e-book lending library, so the users are able to download one title at a time, which will remain active for 30 days. After finishing the book, they will be able to download another, noting that the newly-acquired book will replace the previous one. Each of the  three rounds of this year’s campaign will involve ten latest e-books being made available.

The titles offered during the August edition are as follows:

Ości (Fishbones) – Ignacy Karpowicz
Witajcie w Rosji (Stories of Motherland) – Dmitry Glukhovsky
Jony Ive – Leander Kahney
Kiedyś o tym miejscu napiszę (One Day I Will Write About This Place) – Binyavanga Wainaina
Drzewo migdałowe (The Almond Tree) – Michelle Corasanti
Kongres futurologiczny (The Futurological Congress) – Stanisław Lem
I jak tu nie biegać (Can’t Help Running) – Beata Sadowska
Haiku. Haiku mistrzów (Haiku. Haiku of Masters) – Ryszard Krynicki
Zamień chemię na jedzenie (Switch from Chemicals to Food) – Julita Bator
Magiczne drzewo. Czerwone krzesło (The Magic Tree. The Red Chair) – Andrzej Maleszka

All information concerning the campaign and the list of available books can be found at qr.miastoliteratury.pl.

Czytaj KRK! is an expansion of the 2013 project known as the Virtual Library of Krakow. It involved placing posters that resembled full bookcases at bus and tram stops in six Polish cities, featuring QR codes that, when scanned, allowed downloading free excerpts from nearly 70 latest and bestselling books. This unprecedented action aimed at the promotion of reading with the use of new technologies attracted the attention of major national media and readers. The free fragments had nearly 20 000 downloads in total.

The first round of the campaign included the participation of the following publishers: Cyfrant, Insignis, Karakter, Otwarte, Sine Qua Non, Wydawnictwo a5, Wydawnictwo Literackie, Znak, and Znak Emotikon.

The books are recommended by the campaign’s media patrons: LubimyCzytać.pl web portal, Radio Kraków, and Dziennik Polski.

The project is co-financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage.

It seems to me that the 20th century is too much for me. And perhaps there is no sense in trying to grasp the whole, if we are interested in details. If we like to tell local stories, why should we take up the universal ones? I have always been interested in such a micro-scale outlook and in the world of detail, as in it, I imagine, the whole is reflected, in the same way as the whole world is mirrored in the smallest shard of a smashed car window. Grzegorz Jankowicz from Tygodnik Powszechny weekly is talking to Miljenko Jergović about the grandfather conscripted to Bosnian army, about the family relic written in Italian but in Cyrillic characters, about the last meal of Francis Ferdinand and about literature, which may be the only rescue for martyrs and exiles.

Let us remind you that the newest issue of Tygodnik Powszechny features the writer’s short story entitled The Supernatural Expression of His Hands, concerning the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo.

Miljenko Jergović – one of the most prominent contemporary Croatian writers, whose works have been translated into many languages, including the Polish language, will appear in Krakow during this year’s Conrad Festival. The 6th round of the Festival is entitled the Shared Worlds. It will take seven days, beginning on Monday, 20th October, and ending on 26th October. The organisers of the Conrad Festival are the City of Krakow, the Tygodnik Powszechny Foundation and the Krakow Festival Office.

Miljenko Jergović, a writer, poet and columnist, born in Sarajevo, Bosnia, graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy of the Sarajevo University. He made his debut with a poetry volume, Opservatorija Varšava, in 1988. Four years later he began to work as a publisher and a journalist for Nedjeljna Dalmacija weekly. Since 1993 he has lived and worked in Croatia. His collection of short stories, entitled Sarajevski Marlboro (1994) and focusing on the ravages of war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, brought him the recognition of critics and international circles. Jergović owes his success to the excellent narration leading ability, to the lyricism present also in his prose works and to the courage of talking about the sensitive issue of history and including it in his fiction.

The writer is a winner of around a dozen awards, among others the Erich-Maria Remarque Peace Prize, the Premio Napoli, or the Meša Selimović Award for the best novel in the area of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Croatia and Montenegro. For the book Srda Sings in the Twilights at Pentecost (2011) he received the Angelus Central European Literary Prize, awarded to these writers from Central Europe who in their work take up the most vital contemporary issues, who evoke reflection, and broaden the knowledge about the world of other cultures.

Already tomorrow (9th July), a supplement to Tygodnik Powszechny weekly, The Literary Magazine. Books in the Weekly, will be issued. It will contain the interview with the writer conducted by Grzegorz Jankowicz, the Executive Director of the Conrad Festival. Miłosz Waligórski is the author of the translation.

The newest issue of Tygodnik Powszechny, which from tomorrow (9th July) will be available at newsagents’ and press salons all over Poland, will also feature Miljenko Jergović’s short story, The Supernatural Expression of His Hands. Enjoy the reading!

We would like to add that the first announced guests of this year’s edition of the Festival are: the outstanding, American writer Paul Auster, the distinguished French philosopher Jacques Rancière, and the Nike Award laureate Olga Tokarczuk. The festival events will include meetings and discussions attended by outstanding writers, philosophers, directors and visual artists from all over the world. We will be talking about the relationships between literature and reality, as well as discussing the linguistic and literary tools which allow people to transcend the mental, cultural and aesthetic borders. This year’s Festival is entitled the Shared Worlds. Welcome!

We will soon announce more guests of the Conrad Festival. Please check our website www.conradfestival.pl and the Facebook profile.

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