A Government Trying to Rebuild a Reading Habit, One Grant at a Time

I keep thinking about a small detail buried in a government decree from January of this year: Uzbekistan is now requiring workplaces to set up a physical “book corner” and run a monthly “reading hour” for employees. Not schools — workplaces. Offices, factories, ministries. There’s even an internal ranking system tracking who reads the most, with a cash prize equal to a month’s salary for the top reader.

There’s something almost touching about the specificity of it, and also something a little sad. You don’t legislate a “reading hour” into existence unless the habit has genuinely eroded and someone in government noticed and decided it mattered enough to write into law.

Uzbekistan has spent the better part of a decade trying to rebuild its publishing ecosystem and its reading culture more or less from the ground up, and the newest round of measures, formalized this January, gives a pretty clear picture of where the pressure points are.

The most direct intervention is aimed at people who actually write books. Young writers can now apply for competitive grants that cover, for up to a year, a monthly stipend worth fifty times the base calculation unit — enough, in local terms, to let someone write without a second job eating all their hours. On the translation side, the government will cover half the production costs and eighty percent of the copyright costs for translating major foreign literature into Uzbek, and for translating Uzbek literature outward into other languages. That second half matters more than it might look at first glance. A national literature that only gets read domestically stays provincial almost by definition; a translation subsidy is, in a quiet way, an attempt to put Uzbek writers into conversation with the rest of the world’s readers rather than leaving them talking only to each other.

There’s also a slower, more structural piece: every year, at least three professional and technical books from abroad are supposed to get translated into Uzbek by local publishers, annotated with glossaries and explanatory notes by qualified specialists. It’s an unglamorous kind of literary infrastructure — nobody’s writing poems about a translated engineering textbook — but it’s the sort of thing that determines whether a country’s professionals can actually work from up-to-date knowledge in their own language, or whether they’re permanently a few years behind because the good material only exists in English.

None of this happens in a vacuum. It builds on a longer push that started with something more physical: getting book-selling spaces into towns and cities that didn’t have any. Regional governments were told, back in earlier rounds of this policy, to hand over unused state-owned buildings, rent-free, to anyone willing to open a specialized bookstore. Shops that did more than seventy percent of their business in books got a tax exemption. That’s the kind of policy that doesn’t generate headlines but quietly changes whether a teenager in a smaller regional town has anywhere at all to buy a novel.

The most recent presidential address added a number that stuck with me: ten million books a year are meant to be distributed to school libraries, framed explicitly as an effort to get young people in local neighborhoods reading again. There’s also a longer-range plan running through 2030 to digitize library collections entirely, so that physical distance from a major city library stops being the reason someone can’t get access to a book.

I don’t think any of this guarantees a reading renaissance. You can subsidize book prices and still lose to a phone screen; you can build a library and still find it empty. Reading habits are shaped by a hundred things a ministry can’t legislate — what your parents read to you, whether your friends talk about books, whether you’re too exhausted after work to open one. A mandated “reading hour” at the office might produce a genuine habit in some people and pure performance in others, and there’s no easy way from the outside to tell which is happening.

But I find myself less cynical about this than I expected to be, mostly because of where the money is actually going. It’s not vanity publishing for state-approved narratives — it’s stipends for young writers to have time to write, and subsidies specifically for bringing outside literature in and sending local literature out. That’s a bet on literature as exchange rather than literature as propaganda, which is a distinction worth noticing, especially from a government that could have chosen the easier, more self-serving version of a “reading culture” campaign.

Whether it works is a ten-year question, not a one-year one. But it’s rare to see a state put actual line items — fifty times the base unit here, eighty percent of copyright costs there — behind something as soft-sounding as “getting people to read more.” I’ll take that as a more honest starting point than most cultural policy manages.

Amonboyeva Shahnoza, student of Urgench State University, working towards a bachelor’s in computer engineering