World of Reading started in 1989, founded by Cindy Tracy, a multilingualist who got fed up trying to find decent foreign language books for her own kids and decided to source them herself. The store now carries foreign language books, ESL materials, and learning games in over 100 languages. You'll find the obvious ones (French, Spanish, Mandarin, German) but also some genuinely hard-to-track-down options like Maltese, Alsatian, and Cornish.
The inventory covers graded readers, bilingual editions, children's books, DVDs, audio CDs, software, and games, all sorted by language and proficiency level. The organization is the kind that only comes from someone who actually uses these materials, not just someone listing them. Government agencies, school districts, and public libraries have been longtime buyers, which is a decent signal about the catalog's reliability. There's also a monthly drawing for a free reader. Small thing, but the kind of detail that sticks.
Why hobbyists stay: No publisher ties, so the selection isn't shaped by distribution contracts. Special requests are genuinely handled, not just acknowledged.
