Do Book Giveaway Programs Promote the Home Literacy Environment and Children’s Literacy-Related Behavior and Skills?

Book giveaway programs provide free books to families with infants to encourage caregivers to begin reading to their children during infancy. This meta-analysis of 44 studies retrieved from 43 articles tests the effects of three major book giveaway programs: Bookstart (n = 11), Reach Out and Read (n = 18), and Imagination Library (n = 15). Effect sizes were aggregated within two domains—home literacy environment and literacy-related behavior and skills—before being averaged across studies. The findings corroborate the assumption that book giveaway programs promote children’s home literacy environment (d = 0.31, 95% CI [0.23, 0.38], k = 30), which subsequently results in more interest in reading and children scoring higher on measures of literacy-related skills prior to and during the early years of school (d = 0.29, 95% CI [0.23, 0.35], k = 23).

Making Books Affordable

This chapter talks about country music star Dolly Parton, who is also a poet at heart. She is an avid reader, with an extensive book collection. As a child growing up in Appalachia, however, Dolly experienced book hunger first-hand. It explains how Dolly's own childhood experience motivated her to found the Imagination Library as a way to ensure that all children could experience the joy of book ownership. The chapter also discusses other organizations like First Book that reinvents the traditional book supply chain. Rather than relying on for-profit bookstores as an intermediary, First Book and Imagination Library have innovated alternative, more cost-effective systems to deliver books to children from low-income backgrounds. Through a combination of charitable dollars and cost savings, innovative nonprofits are bringing books to millions of American children who otherwise could not afford them.

Ending Book Hunger

Worldwide, billions of people suffer from book hunger. For them, books are too few, too expensive, or do not even exist in their languages. This book argues that this is an educational crisis: the most reliable predictor of children's achievement is the size of their families' book collections. This book highlights innovative nonprofit solutions to expand access to print. First Book, for example, offers diverse books to teachers at bargain prices. Imagination Library mails picture books to support early literacy in book deserts. Worldreader promotes mobile reading in developing countries by turning phones into digital libraries. Pratham Books creates open access stories that anyone may freely copy, adapt, and translate. Can such efforts expand to bring books to the next billion would-be readers? The book reveals the powerful roles of copyright law and licensing, and sounds the clarion call for readers to contribute their own talents to the fight against book hunger.

The Imagination Library Program and Kindergarten Readiness

Literature suggests that reading to children can have a significant impact on their early literacy development and long-term school performance. We examine whether consistent participation (i.e., three or more years) in Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library (DPIL), a book distribution program that provides one book per month to children ages birth through five, is associated with higher kindergarten readiness. This study examines 2,731 incoming kindergartners in the Syracuse City School District in 2013 and 2014 using the AIMSweb Letter Naming Fluency (LNF) test to assess kindergarten readiness. LNF is frequently identified as the best single indicator of risk for reading failure and has been shown to have a strong ability to predict future reading, vocabulary, and language development. Examining both the entire population and propensity score matched groups, we find that a significantly higher percentage of those consistently participating in DPIL were considered as ready for kindergarten. This difference remained even after controlling for key demographic variables.