International Book Day is celebrated on April 23, coinciding with the death of 3 important authors, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Garcilaso de la Vega, and it is a celebration decreed for the first time by UNESCO that began in 1989 and is currently a tradition to celebrate it every year in which most of the member countries organize book fairs that usually last for weeks before or from that day until a few weeks later.
Currently, after 2 years of inactivity due to the pandemic, many countries will celebrate it again, many of them offering free or reduced-price books. In any case, if you are interested in getting any book in PDF, you can visit InfoBooks, an extensive virtual library where you can find books of all literary genres and all topics, as long as they have a free distribution license.
The current relevance of Book Day
Our society today is not more uneducated by definition, but it is more reluctant to read since our lives have become a routine that for many is unbreakable. However, the space for reading must exist, due to its multiple benefits both for the intellect and for health and because of the enormous linguistic wealth that we can acquire by reading.
Currently, both in the English language and in the Spanish language, gradual degeneration of the language has been promoted in many circles and the best way to combat these phenomena is by promoting reading, the beauty of the Romance and Anglo-Saxon language must be preserved and the best way to do it is developing a reading society, which is UNESCO’s main goal with Book Day.
Health benefits of reading
Although Don Quixote ended up going crazy from reading so many chivalric books, the truth is that reading has a positive impact on mental health, youth sagas like Harry Potter can help the youngest to prevent different mental disorders that are very common today, such as depression and anxiety, in addition to helping them feel part of something, relieving the feeling of loneliness that many often develop in adolescence.
Reading can help improve neuronal synapses and encourage abstract thinking, thus improving our understanding of reality, releasing stress, and reducing cardiovascular risk, while improving our intellectual capacity and reading comprehension. Reading is a very healthy habit, much more so than the current big media, such as music and movies, which deliver chewed-up content that is often not very enriching and even boring, with obvious exceptions, of course. A good book allows us to disconnect from modern life for a while and gives us a chance to clean our minds, to know other worlds, and learn while we devour its pages pleasantly.
On the other hand, reading is an expensive hobby, because the volumes usually have quite enlarged prices, however, there are pages like InfoBooks, which we already mentioned at the beginning that give you an open window to thousands of free books, so that, if you want to start reading, you can do it from any mobile device thanks to this and other digital spaces that are much needed in our modernity.