CAST (Center for Applied Special Technology) is a U.S.-based non-profit organization dedicated to using innovative technologies and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to increase educational opportunities for all students. In celebration of World Book Day, CAST has created UDL Editions, special books in English and Spanish that are designed to help individuals, especially those most at risk, to gain knowledge, skills, and enthusiasm for reading. These editions feature classic texts from world literature in a flexible online interface that provides just-in-time, individualized supports for struggling readers, and added-value features that engage novice and expert readers alike. Texts include the novel The Call of the Wild by Jack London, Shakespeare’s “18th Sonnet,” Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and more. CAST also developed the Strategy Tutor, a tool that supports students when reading on the Web and enables teachers to create Web-based assignments with reading supports.

BookBox is an India and US-based for-profit social enterprise that has created Animated Books or "AniBooks" in 25 languages so far. These multilingual "books" are designed for distribution in various media formats, including, digital downloads, DVDs, VCDs, iPods, mobile phones, hand-helds, and of course, print. The AniBooks are built around the innovative concept of Same Language Subtitling (SLS), pioneered by BookBox's partner non-profit, PlanetRead. In honor of World Book Day, BookBox would like you to download and enjoy its free AniBook in one of the many available languages, available here.

RNIB National Library Service provides the UK's largest collection of books and other reading materials in accessible formats. It also has a team of librarians, including a children's librarian, on hand to advise and support readers. The library includes 14,000 unabridged, professionally recorded, Talking Books - the UK's largest collection of unabridged audio books - and 25,000 braille books - Europe's largest collection. But with less than five per cent of books published in the UK available in large print, audio or braille, the selection is still limited. RNIB is committed to improving this situation. As members of the Right to Read Alliance they are campaigning for blind, partially sighted, dyslexic and other print disabled readers to have access to the same book, at the same time and at the same cost as their sighted peers.

The independent charity Booktrust first launched its biennial Get London Reading campaign in 2004. It aims to encourage Londoners to make more time for reading and to promote London as an international centre for books. Book lovers can find out more about their borough, the books set there, and the writers who have made it famous. They can also interact with a reading map, finding and adding their own favorite literary spots and writers' haunts.

The Digital Hero Book Project (DHBP) is a form of a psychosocial support system (PSS) that enables youth to post their own stories online using information and communication technologies. This is a fun way for children to collaboratively create illustrated story books featuring stories about heroes which they come up with, while providing them with a platform for dealing with serious issues. The books submitted are digitized and presented online. By combining digital storytelling with online group collaboration, the project develops literacy, digital media skills and cross-cultural awareness. The pilot project is taking place in South Africa, Kenya, and the US.

Magoba is a writer and self-publisher, as well as a cultural consultant on the most influential radio radio broadcast station in Uganda; Central Broadcasting Service (CBS). Between 2003 and 2007 Waalabyeki Magoba launched an adult and a children's magazine in his mother tongues to promote sustainable development and education in Uganda. The adults magazine focuses on sustainable development in a poverty striken nation,while the children's aims at cultivating a reading culture at an early stage in a country that does not see literacy and education as a priority. He also publishes booklets for children, which are distributed in schools. Magoba has a lifelong passion for cultivating a reading culture among the poverty- stricken and AIDS-affected, Luganda-speaking people. He is convinced that a vibrant reading culture dispels ignorance, and that knowledge, in turn drives away poverty. In promoting literacy and learning in people's mother tongue, Magoba's works are also a way to fight AIDS and contribute to increased awareness in health and education issues in Ugandan society.

For World Book Day, Avallain, Teshkeel Media, and e-learningforkids have teamed up to offer comic-based reading exercises, interactive basic skill games and other fun learning materials in English, German, French, and Arabic, available here.

The The 2008 National Year of Reading is a year-long celebration of reading, in all its forms. It will help to build a greater national passion for reading – for children, families and adult learners alike. The Year encourages people to read in businesses, homes, and communities around the country, providing new opportunities to read and helping people to get support through schools and libraries. Campaigns and activities throughout the year will inspire everyone to read more, with a focus on reluctant readers, those with low confidence, and boys and dads.

Read up, Fed up encourages teenagers to share their passions about reading - from books and blogs to what they love and hate to read. Recent research by the National Literacy Trust has shown that 71% teens perceive themselves as 'readers', but even those who do not call themselves 'readers' do read newspapers, magazines, websites and emails. One of the aims of the Year is to help stretch the definition of reading to embrace all media, using a social networking website to get teenagers talking amongst themselves to reinforce the message.

Also part of this year's National Year of Reading, a host of celebrity names participated in a TV advert entitled Consequences, which sees the likes of Geri Halliwell, Lenny Henry, Bill Bailey, Jon Culshaw, Jo Brand, Jo Caulfield and Lee Mack all reading lines from different reading materials to form one humorous – and unexpected - narrative. The ad brilliantly captures the richness and diversity of reading – from sports books, novels, magazines, lyrics on a CD cover, cookbooks to car manuals as well as websites. It underpins two key aims of the Year; broadening the definition of reading beyond books, and reminding us that reading is an everyday part of all the things we really enjoy.

Stichting Lezen & Schrijven is a Dutch organization which promotes reading. Very few books are available for people with weak literacy skills in the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, the publisher Eenvoudig Lezen (reading easily) introduced the sequence 'Leeslicht' an initiative to address this issue and support adult education and reading by using well-known authors like Yvonne Kroonenberg and Kadar Abdollah to write easy-to-understand books. The objective of this project is to reduce the threshold to read, decrease the scope of illiteracy and increase awareness around the challenges of illiteracy in the Netherlands.

Curriki is a free, global, community-driven, open-source web site which was developed to allow educators to share ideas, best practices, and free teaching resources. Activities, lesson plans, units of study, and whole courses on Curriki are validated by subject-area experts. Curriki users find and collect information they need, and wiki-based templates are provided so that materials can be easily changed to suit a teacher's particular needs. Members are also encouraged to upload their own best resources to the site. Materials can be uploaded in any format, or built within the wiki templates. Curriki's newly launched "Groups tools" enable people with similar interests or needs to form a community and share ideas or collaborate on creating new curriculum.

MakeBeliefsComix.com helps children and adults tap into their creativity to create their own comic strips in English, Spanish, French, Italian, German and Latin. Parents and kids can select from 15 fun characters with different moods and write words for blank talk and thought balloons to make their characters talk and think. Users can also find story ideas and prompts to help them craft their graphic stories. Once they've created their comics, they can print them to create comic books or email them to friends and family. There are also story ideas and prompts to help users create graphic stories. This site can be used by educators and parents to teach language, reading and writing skills, and by students to facilitate self-expression and storytelling as well as computer literacy.

Indigenous Literacy Day (ILD) is a national event to help raise urgently needed funds to address the literacy crisis in remote Indigenous communities in Australia. ILD is a partnership between the Australian book industry in partnership with The Fred Hollows Foundation. On ILD, events are held around Australia to raise awareness of low literacy levels in remote Indigenous communities. On this day, booksellers, publishers and businesses donate a percentage of sales to ILD, and schools run various fundraising activities. Everyone can get involved and support the day by buying a book or making an individual donation. Indigenous Literacy Day is Wednesday 3 September 2008 and all funds raised go directly to the Fred Hollows Foundation to buy books and literacy resources for over 35 remote Indigenous communities.

LitCam is an international literacy campaign promoting literacy projects in newly industrializing countries, but also taking into account the problems of functional illiteracy in the industrialized nations. Among its many projects is the award-winning Football meets Culture initiative, which combines football with supplementary teaching in order to promote learning in children and adolescents from underprivileged backgrounds.