1. Introduction: universals in learning to read across languages and writing systems Ludo Verhoeven and Charles Perfetti; 2. Learning to read Chinese Becky Chen-Baumgarten and Adrian Pasquarella; 3. Learning to read Japanese Keiko Koda; 4. Learning to read Korean Min Wang, Jeung-Ryeul Cho and Chuchu Li; 5. Learning to read Kannada Sonali Nag; 6. Learning to read Arabic Elinor Saiegh-Haddad; 7. Learning to read Hebrew David Share; 8. Learning to read Greek Athanassios Protopapas; 9. Learning to read Italian Christina Burani, Anna Thornton and Pierluigi Zoccolitti; 10. Learning to read French Helene Deacon, Alain Desrochers and Kyle Levesque; 11. Learning to read Spanish Sylvia Defior and Fransisca Serrano; 12. Learning to read German Karin Landerl; 13. Learning to read Dutch Ludo Verhoeven; 14. Learning to read English Charles Perfetti; 15. Learning to read Czech and Slovakian Marketa Caravolas; 16. Learning to read Russian Elena Grigorenko, Sergey Kornilov and Natalia Rakhlin; 17. Learning to read Finnish Mikko Aro; 18. Learning to read Turkish Aydin Durgunoglu; 19. Epilogue: universals and particulars in learning to read across seventeen orthographies Charles Perfetti and Ludo Verhoeven.