Barbara Adde’s Reviews > Ending Book Hunger: Access to Print Across Barriers of Class and Culture > Status Update

…the story from another perspective. All of these strategies remain to be tried. For most nonprofits in the literary space, however, copyright litigation is neither on brand nor on mission. It may take a library, a law school, or a specially created nonprofit to push the legal envelope.

To stay on the right side of the law, nonprofits should be sure to demonstrate good faith by retaining the book’s copyright notice, the names of the author and illustrator, and the original publisher. Recoloring a well-known picture book’s images to ‘diversify’ its white characters would likely also be deemed fair use. So would altering the text of an outdated children’s book to retell …

A connection between reading and human rights has long been recognized in terms of liberty from censorship. In the 1960s, the global community dedicated increased attention to the entitlement of education for literacy. Today, the critical connection between reading and human rights is the need to explains the availability of reading material.

Between 500M and 1.25B children currently suffer from extreme book hunger: in their languages, children’s books are not available at any price.

First Book delivers around 20M books to 3M students each year.

“Access to Print in Lower-Income and Middle-Income Communities” - study by Profs Susan B Neuman and Donna Celano (Phila PA)

“Although children in the poor neighborhoods depended more heavily on public institutions for access to books, their libraries had shorter hours, lower-quality books, and more dilapidated facilities.”

4 challenges:
- reaching readers who can’t afford going prices
- serving a more diverse population
- developing new titles in neglected languages
- developing more cost-effective distribution methods, both in print and digitally.

Libraries also have very limited reach in most of the world, are expensive to run, and are limited to purchasing titles already in print. In the 21st century, more innovative approaches are needed.

Philanthropists founded public libraries in the 19th and 20th centuries to bring the luxury of reading within the reach of the common man. By themselves, however, libraries cannot achieve this goal. Children’s TV programming comes straight to the home, with hundreds of options available at no direct cost. Books must become similarly convenient if they are to compete effectively for children’s time.”

Summer vacations created a gap of about 3 months between middle- and lower-class students, according to a meta-analysis by Harris Cooper and colleagues….

Simply receiving 10 books, with no further intervention, led to greater summer reading. Over 3 years, reading achievement scores among this group noticeably improved compared to a matched group of students who were not given books.