A reading campaign through the virtual world. Sounds unbelievable, right? But this is exactly what the “Readers Friends” project is doing.

Launched by Sara Al Humaidan in 2011 through twitter, the project to encourage reading habit has hundreds of thousands of followers from different countries.

The site is in Arabic, titled “Teach us how to read.” The project was later widened through another account: “Quote from what you read.” A blog titled, “A book every day,” has also been created, besides a site to encourage reading English.

“All these are a part of the Readers Friends project with specific identity on twitter, Facebook and instagram,” says Humaidan, who won the Prince Mohammad bin Fahd Award for Youth Initiatives in 2013.

The members of Readers Friends have one thing in common: They like to cooperate in a digital framework related to culture and want to change society for the better, besides creating achievers.

The Readers Friends project has a team of 66, both male and female, aged between 17 and 35 years from Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan, Oman, Kuwait, Yemen, Iraq, Morocco, Libya and Palestine. The team is involved in putting content, checking and proof-reading, designing and publishing.

The reading account today has 164,000 followers and a number of followers of “Tell us what you are reading” has reached 156,000 through twitter and instagram. The “Reading Challenge” account on twitter has 7,700 followers, and around 696 followers for reading in the English language account.

The number of programs in the Web pages of the project since 2014 is 40 with slots like the cultural night show and exchange of opinion and perspectives together with new books and a summary of the author. There is also a book related to children.

This is in addition to expansion plans to move from the virtual world to the real world through clubs and festivals.

Waaed Al Arefiej, a member of the project, said they already participated in the Riyadh Book Fair last month.

There will be a partnership agreement with the Ministry of Culture and Information to have cultural activities, she added.