World Book Day Celebrates 20th Anniversary
Today, Thursday, World Book Day celebrates its 20th anniversary - and bookstores, publishers, libraries, schools and booklovers around the world are joining in the celebrations. World Book Day is also a very special day at Bertelsmann, especially for publishers. “Reading is an important key to education and independent thinking,” says Karin Schlautmann, Head of Corporate Communications. “Therefore, it’s particularly important to us to specifically support the promotion of literacy and reading. An enlightened society needs books, because only people who read can also understand and make independent decisions.”
To help over 50 children’s daycare centers in the Gütersloh region promote reading among their charges and to honor the work of educators, Bertelsmann has also donated books this year from the Club and German Random House publishers’ ranges. At the “Rappelkiste” children’s daycare center yesterday the children were already reading titles such as “Im Garten der Schmetterlinge” (In the Garden of Butterflies) or “Das grosse Lieselotte Geschichtenbuch” (The Big Lieselotte Storybook). Ines Kanning, head of the daycare center, was as pleased by the gifts as the children were: “Books enrich the work of our daycare center, because they stimulate the children's imagination and awaken their desire for reading. We’re delighted that we now have even more titles that the children can discover for themselves.”
"Ich schenk dir eine Geschichte"
Verlagsgruppe Random House and its children’s and young adult imprint CBJ are once again making a decisive contribution to World Book Day with the book “Ich schenk Dir eine Geschichte” (My Gift to You: A Story), Germany’s most extensive and long-running campaign to promote reading. This year, author Dirk Ahner has written an exciting children’s thriller featuring intrepid heroes – “Die Krokodilbande in geheimer Mission” (The Crocodile Gang On A Secret Mission), featuring the detectives Mike and Danilo. To publicize the campaign, a major press conference was held at Cologne Zoo yesterday. Not only were there a lot of reptiles present – after all one of them is the star of the book – but also about 50 schoolchildren, as well as CBJ author Dirk Ahner, RTL presenter and Stiftung Lesen reading ambassador Peter Kloeppel, and Jürgen Weidenbach, Publisher and Managing Director of CBJ.
