The deadline for using book vouchers by 18-year-olds was postponed until April 2025, due to delays in the creation of the platform that will award them, according to a diploma published this Saturday in Diário da República. Young people can therefore use the book vouchers from this month, October 21st, until April of next year.
According to the order from the office of the Minister of Culture, signed on September 27th, the deadline set out in the Check-Book Program Regulations, according to which beneficiaries could use it until September 30th, 2024, is postponed until the 23rd April 2025.
This need to change the deadline initially stipulated is related to the delays seen in the creation of the platform responsible for issuing book vouchers, worth twenty euros, to 18-year-olds.
In December last year, the Council of Ministers approved the implementation of the book voucher, with an allocation of 4.4 million euros, to be financed through the Cultural Promotion Fund.
This measure, one of the last approved for Culture before the Socialist Party Government came into administration, implied the creation of a platform to operationalize the allocation of book vouchers through bookstores.
In January this year, the president of the Portuguese Association of Publishers and Booksellers (APEL) – the entity responsible for working on this platform together with DGLAB (Directorate-General for Books, Archives and Libraries) – announced that the platform would be operational until the end of March.
The objective is for young people who turn 18 to validate this information on the platform, which automatically debits a ‘voucher’, with a ‘QR Code’, worth 20 euros, to be discounted across the entire network of bookstores participating in the platform.
Almost at the end of March, the president of APEL, Pedro Sobral, indicated that the platform was ready to enter the pilot testing phase, however, almost half a year later (on September 6th), it continued to be undergoing “tests and improvements” , with no scheduled start date, as revealed at the time by the deputy director general of Books, Archives and Libraries, Bruno Eiras.
Furthermore, the Regulations for the Book Check Program, created by order of March 2024, provided that that year’s book checks would be used by beneficiaries until September 30, 2024, that is, in just over three weeks.
Given this deadline, Bruno Eiras admitted that the regulation on the operation of the initiative had to be revised – which ended up happening with the published order – and Pedro Sobral admitted that the project was “quite late”.
Questioned more than once by the Lusa agency about the progress and implementation of the pilot program, the Ministry of Culture, supervised by Dalila Rodrigues, did not give any response.
The book voucher is a measure proposed by APEL, which defended the allocation of 100 euros to 18-year-olds to purchase books, but the Government decided to set the value at 20 euros and limited the benefit to around 200,000 people.
