FIL Program 2025 Program Search
FIL Professionals
Annual Reading Promoters Conference
Opening Ceremony
Monday, December 01
09:30 to 10:00
FIL Professionals
Annual Reading Promoters Conference
Opening Lecture: “Starting from the Beginning”
Participant: Felipe Garrido
Monday, December 01
10:00 to 10:50
FIL Professionals
Annual Reading Promoters Conference
Lecture: “Wordless books? Reading promotion in a synthetic reality”
Annual Reading Promoters Conference
Lecture: “Wordless books? Reading promotion in a synthetic reality”
This talk invites reading promoters to reflect on the radically different context in which readers are now formed: a world where images, videos, and artificial intelligence offer immediate and immersive narratives, displacing the central role of the written word. The challenge lies in confronting this technological transformation to ask how we can continue bringing children, young people, and adults closer to the unique experience of reading books and texts, without denying the reality of the symbolic competition they face. More than a warning, this talk aims to serve as an impulse: to acknowledge the digital environment and, from that awareness, renew the conviction that reading not only endures but also offers depth, imagination, and meaning in a time saturated with fleeting stimuli.
Participant: Marcelo Torres Llamas
Monday, December 01
11:30 to 12:20
FIL Professionals
Annual Reading Promoters Conference
Workshop-Talk: “Promotion from the public library: AI as a tool for innovation and support”
Annual Reading Promoters Conference
Workshop-Talk: “Promotion from the public library: AI as a tool for innovation and support”
The public library, as a democratic space for access to knowledge, faces the challenge of reinventing its reading promotion strategies in light of the technological and cultural transformations of the twenty-first century. In this context, artificial intelligence (AI) emerges not only as a technical tool but also as an instrument of transformation that enables the personalization of reading experiences, the optimization of library processes, and the strengthening of the connection between users and collections.
This talk presents the integration of AI into reading promotion initiatives through recommendation systems, analysis of reading habits, content generation, and virtual engagement within the “Juan José Arreola” Public Library of the State of Jalisco. The initiative seeks to enhance the library’s role as a cultural mediator by adapting its services to new modes of informational consumption and multimodal storytelling. Through an ethical, inclusive, and sustainable approach, the proposal envisions a synergy between library expertise and AI capabilities, with the goal of enriching the user experience, expanding the reach of collections, and consolidating the library as an innovative reference point within the contemporary information ecosystem.
Participant: Javier Sanz
Monday, December 01
13:10 to 14:00
FIL Professionals
Annual Reading Promoters Conference
Lecture: “When he woke up, the cheesecake was still there”
Annual Reading Promoters Conference
Lecture: “When he woke up, the cheesecake was still there”
Artificial intelligence already reads faster than any human being: in a matter of seconds, it can summarize entire novels and generate texts of any desired length with apparent coherence. In this context, the figure of the reflective reader seems to fade. Why read, if machines can already do it for us? If we move beyond fear of machines and instead reaffirm our conviction in the value of reading, we may conclude that deep reading has become, almost, an act of cultural resistance, a way to train attention, empathy, and critical thinking in the face of a digital environment that tends to homogenize, accelerate, and simplify.
Yet something even deeper is at stake: the pleasure of understanding. This pleasure, evolutionarily selected as an adaptive reward through the release of neurotransmitters, does not arise from the rapid consumption of data, but from the slow assembly of ideas, from the connection between meanings, from that inner light that ignites after demanding reading. AI can provide answers, but it cannot give us that lived spark of meaning. To read is to understand, and to understand deeply is to experience joy.
In a world that externalizes comprehension and rewards immediacy, defending slow reading is a way of defending our humanity. Reading deeply is more than acquiring information: it is living meaning, building discernment, and experiencing the pleasure of understanding. This conference will explore these themes and present strategies to foster this unique pleasure that only reading can provide—especially among beginning or less experienced readers.
Participant: Toni Pou
Tuesday, December 02
10:00 to 10:50
FIL Professionals
Annual Reading Promoters Conference
Talk: “Transformations of reading practices in the context of AI”
Annual Reading Promoters Conference
Talk: “Transformations of reading practices in the context of AI”
This conference will explore how artificial intelligence is transforming the ways we read and process texts in the twenty-first century. It will examine both the opportunities offered by AI, such as the potential for an enhanced reading experience, and the challenges, risks, and threats it poses, including its impact on deep reading, the erosion of our comprehension abilities, and the autonomy of the reader. Finally, the discussion will address how we might integrate these technologies constructively while preserving the essential human dimensions of the reading experience.
Participant: Daniel Benchimol
Tuesday, December 02
11:30 to 12:20
FIL Professionals
Annual Reading Promoters Conference
Dialogue: “Machines that read, voices that resist”
Annual Reading Promoters Conference
Dialogue: “Machines that read, voices that resist”
In a world where screens, networks, and now artificial intelligence are radically transforming our relationship with the written word, what place does reading hold today? This conversation between Naief Yehya and Samuel Larson invites us to look both backward—to the burned libraries and the utopias of science fiction—and forward—to the algorithms that write and summarize on our behalf—in order to ask how we can sustain the joy, resistance, and depth of books amid these ongoing cultural transformations
Participants: Samuel Larson Guerra, José Ramón Mikelajáuregui
Presenter: Imelda Martorell
Tuesday, December 02
13:10 to 14:00
FIL Professionals
Annual Reading Promoters Conference
Lecture: “How to give wings to poems and stories?”
Annual Reading Promoters Conference
Lecture: “How to give wings to poems and stories?”
We will explore various ways for children’s and young adult literature to surprise and engage young readers: storytelling and poetry recitation, creation and filming of sketches, audio recording, musical adaptation of poems, animation of picture books, video series production, unusual interviews, and more.
Participant: Jorge Luján
Presenter: Cecilia Espinosa
Wednesday, December 03
10:00 to 10:50
FIL Professionals
Annual Reading Promoters Conference
Lecture: “Igniting the reading spark in the age of AI: Strategies to attract and captivate new audiences”
Participant: Pilar Gordoa
Wednesday, December 03
11:30 to 12:20
FIL Professionals
Annual Reading Promoters Conference
Workshop-Talk: “Does the algorithm dream of electric verses?”
Annual Reading Promoters Conference
Workshop-Talk: “Does the algorithm dream of electric verses?”
An algorithm can describe a lump in the throat, but it has no idea what that actually means. It can process millions of words without pause, recite—from memory—the most beautiful stories without its voice faltering, and yet it is incapable of trembling at a haiku or beating in time with a sonnet. The emotion and pleasure of reading remain distinctly human territory.
In this talk, Jorge Gonzalvo—recipient of Spain’s 2022 National Reading Promotion Award—invites us to reflect on the use of AI to foster reading, but also on how to maintain critical thinking, combat various biases, and decide when it is time to turn off the screen. Reading mediation professionals face new challenges related to AI: digital overexposure, scheduling disconnections to safeguard attention—our scarcest resource—and developing best practices that connect technology with ethics and well-being.
It is not only about knowing what AI can do, but also about deciding the role we wish to assign it. The algorithm is a powerful tool, an amplifier of imagination, but it is neither a replacement nor a substitute for the reading mediator. And that decision—how to read, how to guide, how to feel—remains, irrevocably, in our hands. After all, the capacity to dream—whether of sheep or electric verses—remains, exclusively, ours.
Participant: Jorge Gonzalvo
Wednesday, December 03
13:10 to 14:00