On Wednesday, July 17, ‘Saba’ presented a new initiative, project ‘Sabkultura’ (საბკულტურა). Saba is famous in Georgia for uniting two parts of the literary world, the Saba Literary Prize and Saba ebook platform. Now Saba has presented Sabkultura – a new educational platform made specifically for the new generation. Sabkultura aims to give literature a new life, bringing it to the youth in a way that is currently popular in Georgia.

Sabkultura unites a free and open space where socializing over books and the knowledge they give to readers will be easy in both digital and real spaces. 

“This is a new movement of book lovers and readers, members of which believe that reading changes thoughts, thoughts change actions, and actions change the environment,” noted the presenter of Sabkultura during its public presentation in Fabrika on Wednesday. 

Saba aims to make reading more inviting and interesting, and to accomplish that they plan to organize numerous projects and activities. An updated, improved version of Saba Reader is a good starting point. “Sabkultura” is a joint project of Saba and Communicational Agency Livingstone. After implementing Sabkultura, the Saba Reader has some new functions: giving the best possible experience with modern technology, making reading a pleasant, accessible process for everyone.   

The platform of Sabkultura will be available via an app. The app will have monthly payment and in turn, the readers will be able to download three books. The updated version allows a library format – it will be possible to “return” the books after having read them. After deleting the ebooks, users will be able to download new ones. What’s more, implementing Sabkultura means that the prices of ebooks will be more affordable. 

“We wanted to make the relationship between the reader and the author more integrated and make our platform more valuable. To make that possible we knew that we had concentrate all content in one place,” said Vakho Vakhtangishvili from Leavingstone. “For that reason, Sabkultura will offer not only books to its users but educational radio programs as well. Subkultura will be equipped with a unique audio format. The audio books will be read by artificial intelligence (AI) which sounds just like a human. This is a great step in technological development, putting Georgia forward in the field. Using is much more efficient than using human resources, 1200% more efficient to be exact.” 

The presentation of Sabkultura concluded with Levan Berdzenishvili’s lecture on the importance of literature. Levan Berdzenishvili is a Georgian politician, author and academic who served as the Director of the National Parliamentary Library of Georgia from 1998 to 2004.

Saba is the biggest Literary Prize in Georgia and a leading innovative web-platform. Saba also manages many social-literary projects. Saba was founded with the support of TBC Bank in 2012. Today, it has over 190,000 users and 6,000 ebooks in its catalogue.      

source: GeorgiaToday/ georgiatoday.ge