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Posted by Jamie McKay on March 4, 2021
There are so many international days that they do tend to wash over you like annoying adverts on the telly. We know they are on, but we just ignore them and move on. However, anything that encourages children and adults to read is, in our opinion, a worthy cause. So, what is World Book Day and how can Ability Superstore help you to enjoy one of life’s most enjoyable pleasures, reading.
If you have children, or have ever seen children, you will have noticed pictures on their parents Facebook pages every year of them dressed as Hermione Grainger, Gandalf, Tracy Beaker, and other famous literary creations.
This is because of World Book Day! Schools across the globe support this initiative to encourage people of all ages to read.
In 1995 UNESCO created World Book Day “as a worldwide celebration of books and reading. It is marked in over 100 countries around the globe.”
In a world of PlayStation, x-boxes, Nintendo Switches, YouTube and tiktok it is extremely easy for some children to forget all about books completely.
Even more so in a pandemic when home-schooling means that many children don’t have access to many, if any, reading resources and we aren’t able to browse our local libraries or even take a trip into town to our local bookshop.
One of the main aims of World Book Day is get people to read for fun. One of the funny things about reading as opposed to other pastimes is that you can forget that you enjoyed it and forget how to get into reading.
Which is strange because if we go for six months without watching Netflix or iPlayer we don’t forget how to log in or bail out of a programme after 1 minute. Unless it is that new quiz show with Gordon Ramsay of course.
When we have been working from home or working from work or working from home and home-schooling from home, it is natural to get to the end of the day and just want to sit on the sofa with some beige food and watch tv that is ‘so bad it is good’ so that we can to escape the world for an hour or two (Erm, we know this is about World Book Day but Married At First Sight Australia is the best 'so bad it is good' tv out there right now by the way).
World Book Day have a huge library sized number of resources on their website that we can most definitely recommend looking at.
From primary schools, through to teens and family reading resources, there is loads of excellent information and genuinely fun and interesting activities that they have to offer.
There is also a one-pound book feature, where every year a selection of books is made available for a pound, again to help making reading more accessible for everyone.
As we mentioned earlier, World Book Day is about getting everyone to read, and that means all the grown ups who say they are too busy reading about mortgages or Covid-19, or don’t have the time because they have watched every episode of Bridgerton in one night.
It isn’t as simple as just picking up a book for some people though. If you have limited vision, limited mobility in your hand, or like me have glasses that you wear to see but for some reason take off when you have to see to read, reading can be tricky to get comfortable with.
If you are straining to see tiny font or hold a Harry Potter book that weighs as much as a baby hippo, then it takes a lot of the pleasure out of reading.
Here at Ability Superstore, we have a range of reading aids, that we have carefully chosen in order to help you feel more comfortable, more relaxed, and more likely to be able to curl up in your favourite armchair to enjoy a good book.
The Book Holder Stand will hold your book at a comfortable angle for you, say goodbye to neck and back strain and sit or lie down in comfort for a relaxing read.
The Book Holder Book Lift is a delightful book stand to hold your novel or magazine that will also be handy for keeping recipe books propped up in the kitchen.
Reading at night presents its own set of particular problems, having the lights dimmed enough so your room looks cosy, but you strain your eyes when you read, which ends up with you having to put the ‘big light’ on at night. An activity normally only carried out in the evening when you have lost some keys.
The Lifemax High Vision Reading Light has been designed to solve this problem, with a soothing amount of light so that you can read comfortably.
Our range of magnifying products will also be helpful for reading, some books and magazines seem to deliberately choose the smallest font they can in order to fit as many words on the page as possible.
From the traditional magnifying glass to full page reading sheets, we have daily living aids that will help you to read, they are also really handy for doing crosswords and sudoku, and reading knitting patterns or instruction manuals for your new tech and gadgets.
Of course, reading also includes listening, whether it is a favourite podcast or an audiobook or even a talking photo album that lets you record audio accompaniment for visual photo memories that loved ones can enjoy time and time again.
If you would like some advice on reading aids, vision aids, daily living aids or any of our mobility aids then please do contact us.
Our friendly and extremely knowledgeable customer service team will be more than happy to help.
You can call us on 0800 255 0498 or we have a live chat on our website that will connect you to the very same customer service team (not robots like you will encounter on some other websites!). All you have to do is click on the little blue square on the bottom right of any of our website pages.