Buying the Best Battery and/or A/C Powered Book Light Designs that Properly Illuminate Your Books

Properly selected, a book light can reduce eye strain by providing excellent lighting while reading, even in the darkest places, and can save both energy and money. A well designed clip on book light design can make your light easy to affix to your book, book holder, or book stand, and many can also function as hobby, craft, podium or task lights. Light weight incandescent or LED designs can put just the right lighting exactly where you need it, without wasting energy or disturbing those around you, like a spouse or partner on the other side of the bed.

By lighting your reading materials with the correct amount and temperature of light, the right 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 correct amount of light for what we’re reading can be a real challenge. Obviously, the most perfect light for reading is natural sunlight shining directly over your shoulder, but we often have to read when or where such lighting isn’t available. Hence, the right book light, a light we can use any time and any place we choose, iscan be} an incredible convenience. By then turning off the overheads and other lighting lighting things other than our reading, we conserve considerable energy and the money it takes to pay for it.

When making the choice between incandescent and LED book light designs, three primary considerations are: the differences in the type of light produced by these two distinct technologies, the cost of original purchase, and the cost of operation over time. Incandescent light sources typically produce a warm, somewhat yellowish light, and incandescent bulbs typically have service lives of between 15-25 hours of use and then have to be replaced. LED lights produce a whiter, cooler light, and many designs are now optimized to approximate the output of light from the sun. Hence, most book lovers find the output of modern LED designs to be more “sun like”, producing greater clarity and contrast and making all printing easier to read. While replacement incandescent bulbs are readily available in local stores, and over the Internet, the expense and inconvenience of replacement can really add up over time. Because LEDs offer life expectancies of 10,000 to 50,000 hours, the 10-20% greater initial cost of acquisition quickly becomes irrelevant. Generally, then, LED book light designs are now the preferred choice over the older incandescent.

Battery powered book light designs are the handiest, as your light can be used virtually anywhere. Unfortunately, batteries themselves are also a replaceable item, typically lasting 20-30 hours of use at best, in either LED or incandescent designs. Available A/C adapters are available for most book lights, but another option is to use a good battery recharger and rechargeable batteries. Most book light designs use either AA or AAA batteries, and many rechargeable options are on offer. Additionally, if your light is to be used close to an A/C outlet, an optional A/C adapter is usually a money saving investment.

Finally, the area over which the light is dispersed is also a consideration when choosing the perfect book light for a particular application. If your light is only to be used to light a standard mass market paperback book, a single LED or incandescent book light design will probably be sufficient; but, if you read magazines, most hard cover books or a stand full of music, you’ll want a more powerful design which can distribute the light over an appropriately larger area. The ideal way to determine the most perfect light for any particular application will be to test it in actual use. Wherever you shop, make sure your dealer offers both good pre-sale and return service, just in case your first choice doesn’t quite hit the mark. With diligence, you can buy just the right light for any application.