World Book Day, celebrated on April 23rd, pays homage to literature and promotes a love for reading worldwide, becoming a moment to foster culture and the exchange of ideas through books.

This celebration invites us to reflect on the transformative power of the written word and its ability to inspire, educate, and connect people of all cultures and times. An opportunity to celebrate literary diversity and promote accessibility to reading, thus fostering personal and social development.

The IAEC joins this commemoration by sharing some noteworthy initiatives. The Oodi Library in Helsinki, a prominent project in the “City, Culture, and Education” monograph, is a new concept of a public library that extends throughout the municipality’s library network, where the traditional role of these facilities (promoters of knowledge, reading, and information use) is expanded to include new forms of collaborative work, active citizenship, support for learning, and digital literacy, for greater satisfaction of its users.

The “Reading City, a comprehensive program for the promotion of reading in the municipality” in Nova Petrópolis, strongly boosts reading with numerous activities throughout the year, such as book fairs, municipal reading day and its mediators, meetings with authors, ownerless comic books, or reader camps.

Finally, we also highlight the Torres Vedras program “In the heart of my childhood” a project promoting intergenerational relationships where memory books are created. Interested older adults participate in interviews, in which, through memories, they recall lived experiences and engage in a retrospective reflection on their lives. Subsequently, those memories are contextualized. This process allows understanding the personal paths of older adults as the convergence of different realities and decisions. Memories are transformed into small family novels created by a writer, jointly with older adults.

We wish you a Happy World Book Day!