When selected properly, a book light can reduce eye stress by providing excellent lighting while reading, even in darkened venues, and can help to conserve both energy and money. A well designed clip on book light design can make your light easy to securely attach to your book, book holder, or book stand, and many can also function as craft, podium, hobby or other task lighting. Light weight incandescent or LED designs can put just the right amount of light exactly where you need it, without wasting energy or disturbing others around you, like a spouse or partner watching TV.
By lighting your reading materials with the right amount and temperature of light, a book light can help to save your eyes from strain and help you read even when the lights are low. Our eyes require more light as we age, and providing the right amount of light exactly where we’re reading can be a real challenge. Obviously, the best light for reading is natural sunlight coming directly from over your shoulder, but we often need to read when or where sunlight isn’t available. Hence, the right book light, one we can use any time and any place we choose, iscan be} an incredible convenience. Then, turning off the overheads and lamps lighting things other than our reading, we can save considerable energy as well as the money it takes to pay for that energy.
When making the choice between incandescent and LED book light designs, three primary considerations include: the differences in the type of light produced by these two distinct technologies, the cost of original purchase, and the cost of maintenance and operation over time. Incandescent lights typically create a warm, somewhat golden-tinged light, and incandescent bulbs typically have service lives of between 15-25 hours of use and then must be replaced. LED lights produce a whiter, cooler light, with many designs now optimized to approximate the output of lighting from the sun. Today, most readers find the light of modern LED designs to be more “sun like”, producing greater clarity and contrast and making most printing easier to read. While replacement incandescent bulbs are generally available in local electronic retail shops, as well as over the Internet, the cost of replacement can really add up over time. Because LEDs provide life expectancies of 10,000 to 50,000 hours, the 10-20% greater initial purchase price quickly becomes irrelevant. Generally, LED book light designs are now more popular than the older incandescent.
Battery powered book lights are the handiest, since your light can be used almost anywhere. Unfortunately, batteries too are a replaceable item, typically lasting 20-30 hours of use at best, in LED or incandescent designs. Optional A/C adapters are offered for most book lights, but another option is to make use of a good battery recharger and rechargeable batteries. Most book light designs make use of either AA or AAA batteries, and many excellent models are available from which to choose. In addition, if your light is to be used near to an A/C outlet, an optional A/C adapter can be a money saving investment.
Finally, the uniformity of light dispersal and the area over which it is dispersed is also a meaningful consideration when selecting the best book light for a specific application. If your light is only to be used to light a standard size, mass market paperback, a single LED or incandescent book light design will likely be adequate; but, if you read mostly hard cover books, newspapers and magazines, or even a full music stand of sheet music, you’ll want a much more powerful design which distributes the light over a much broader area. The ideal way to determine the best design for your particular application will be to test it in actual use. Wherever you shop, be sure your dealer offers both good pre-sale and return service, in case your first choice turns out not to be as suitable as you had hoped. With a bit of application, you can buy the best book light for each and every use.
