Zoe is three and loves playing at being a bookshop owner. She has a toy till with a barcode reader and her shelves are neatly stacked with books. Yet her family are not great book lovers, and her mother Jayne admits she was surprised when her health visitor suggested reading to her daughter when she was only four months old.

"I would never have dreamt that a young baby would sit with me and look at pictures," she says. "At first I felt a bit silly because I was doing all the talking, but after a few weeks she was putting her hand out to the books and, instead of me turning the pages, she was trying to turn them herself."

Jayne had expected Zoe to rip up the books, but instead she treated them well from the start. "I've been to friends' houses where they haven't had books from babies. You see books scribbled in, torn and with the pages out. They don't know what to do with them."

Reading experts Dr Maggie Moore and Professor Barrie Wade are delighted by Zoe's enthusiasm and confident that the time spent sharing books with her parents will stand her in good stead for her school years.

Now the former teachers have written Baby Power, a practical guide to choosing the right books for all parents, relatives and carers who want to introduce pre-school children to books but are not sure how. It is complemented by a series of books for children aged nine months to three years that teaches them how to hold a book, that text goes from left to right and about sequence and prediction.

Wade, who has taught in primary and secondary schools, stresses that the emphasis in the parental guide is on fun: "Enjoyment is the key to success and parents get just as much out of it as children. We know this because parents have told us how much pleasure they have reading with their children. In short, having fun is a strong motivating factor."

And although he shared books with all three of his daughters, Wade, professor of English in Education at Birmingham University, never intended to teach his three daughters to read: "I just wanted them to enjoy books, but it reached a point where to not allow them to read would have meant hindering the curiosity and appetite for learning which they had developed through book sharing."

Moore, director of the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Newman College, Birmingham, spent 17 years teaching primary school pupils, including those with special needs, and says she could tell within hours whether or not a child had experience of sharing books with parents.

"Those who had spent lots of time book-sharing had a flying start when entering school because they were confident and enthusiastic - crucial foundations for successful learning. A lot of the time pupils finding learning difficult were not less able - they had simply missed out on the benefits of sharing books, and as a result were less confident." What started off as a hunch has now been confirmed by statistical evidence from the Bookstart project, which Wade and Moore launched in 1992, when 300 babies and their families across Birmingham were given free books and encouraged to read together.

Their latest research focuses on the performance of the original Bookstart babies, who are now aged seven and eight in their key stage 1 Sats. The aim was to see if those who started primary school so far ahead of their peers remained so. The results show that these children are still approximately 30% ahead in English-based subjects and 25% ahead in maths and science-based subjects - the same advantage as they had on entering the education system in 1997.

Jessica Garvey, eight, is one of the original Bookstart babies, and Wade and Moore have dedicated Baby Power to her. After asking the Bookstart babies to take part in tests in 1997, Wade sent a book to them all to say thankyou. Jessica was the only one who wrote a letter back, enclosing a three-page book that she had made at school.

"Jess is no superstar, but she was above average in her Sats, both in literacy and numeracy," says her mother Gill. "She is confident, loves books and often sits down with her six-year-old brother Samuel and reads to him and gets him to read to her."

Gill Garvey says that if it were not for the Bookstart research she would never have thought about sharing books with Jessica when she was only four months old. She and her husband read to their daughter on a daily basis and "only when they had time", but soon noticed the results. "Jess was inquisitive and lively, and when she started speaking had a good range of vocabulary. I would recommend Bookstart to all parents."

Through a £6m sponsorship deal with Sainsbury's, the scheme is now operating throughout Britain and aims to provide every baby with a free book by the end of this year.

The millionth book was given out earlier this year. Impressed by the success of Bookstart, the Japanese government is setting up a scheme along the same lines and other countries have expressed interest.

Wade even goes as far as to suggest that with adequate funding Bookstart could meet all educational targets. "We know that regular book sharing will lay the foundations of literacy, and that should mean fewer learning difficulties when the child starts school. I would even say that GCSE results could be affected by the way a baby interacts with its parents."

But although Wade and Moore hope that nearly all parents will realise the benefits of reading, they do not want parents to become competitive about their children's progress.

"We are making real progress at the moment," says Moore. "But if we end up like America, where children undergo assessment all the time, we will have failed."

Early readers

Do

• Make it fun for both you and the baby and praise him or her.

• Talk about the book and its pictures even if you think your baby doesn't understand.

• Let your baby hold and handle the book and turn the pages.

• Take your baby to the library and let your baby choose the books.

• Read a book lots of times because your baby won't get bored.

Don't

• Worry if the baby chews the books (even library books).

• Expect too much of your baby or criticise.

• Be disappointed if your baby isn't interested - try again later.

• Have the television on at the same time, because it is distracting.

• Feel guilty about taking time out to read to your baby.

• Baby Power: Give your child real learning power by Barrie Wade and Maggie Moore is published by Egmont, priced £4.99.