If they were set end to end, these books would circle the earth 1.8 times.

This free program mails an age-appropriate book monthly to each enrolled child from birth to age 5, meaning up to 60 books will fill these children’s shelves by the time they graduate from the program.

Though a selection committee tweaks the lists annually, each participant receives Watty Piper’s “The Little Engine That Could” as their first book and Nancy Carlson’s “Look Out Kindergarten, Here I Come!” as their last.

I’m an information science professor who studies reading behavior. In my research for an upcoming academic article about the Imagination Library, I’ve found that its free monthly books help families develop children’s literacy, prepare children for kindergarten and encourage a lifelong love of reading. https://www.youtube.com/embed/tscb01jfukc?wmode=transparent&start=0 Dolly Parton describes her Imagination Library, starting with what inspired her to create it.

Emphasis on early literacy

Parton, most remembered as a popular country singer, embraced many musical genres during her long and successful career in show business. She was also a songwriter, entrepreneur, actor and philanthropist.

She created this program because she, like most early childhood literacy experts, believed that reading begins in the home. That is, parents and other guardians are a child’s first teachers, and reading aloud to children contributes to their future literacy.

First graders who struggle with reading usually continue to have trouble with literacy later on.

Very young children in lower-income households generally have less access to books and hear fewer words than higher-income kids. This class-based difference may lead to disparities in reading skills later on.

A homegrown program

Like Parton, who was born in a one-bedroom cabin in an Appalachian region of Tennessee that had neither running water nor electricity, the Imagination Library’s origins were modest. It started in her hometown, hardscrabble Sevier County, in late 1995. Its initial order of 1,760 books was destined for the children who lived where she grew up.

The program came from “a very serious place in my heart,” Parton once said. On many occasions, she emphasized how her own father’s illiteracy inspired her to found it – with him.

“Daddy couldn’t read nor write, and it always just seemed to cripple him, and he was embarrassed about it,” Parton told American Libraries in 2018. “My daddy just loved it when all the little kids would call me ‘The Book Lady,’” she said later.

In contrast, Parton was a bookworm. “I always loved books,” she explained in an interview. “I don’t remember learning to read, it was just something I always did. That’s how I knew there was a world beyond the Smoky Mountains.”

How it works

Parton’s Dollywood Foundation covers overhead and administrative expenses, coordinates the book selection committee, maintains the book order system and arranges orders and fulfillment.

The Imagination Library is available to any child in a community participating in the program, regardless of their family’s income.

To be eligible, a community must secure a local partner. Local partners publicize the program and enroll children. They have to pay US$2.60 per month per child to defray costs of purchasing books wholesale and mailing them. These partners include schools, public libraries and government agencies, and several kinds of nonprofits, including foundations.

Nonpartisan expert committees of educators and librarians select the books, nearly all published by Penguin Random House.

The program is continuing under the direction of the Dollywood Foundation’s president, Jeff Conyers. A Penguin Random House vice president said, “We will continue that work with the utmost pride and care, just as we know she would have wanted.”

But funding challenges have arisen in at least four states.

Steady growth and diversification

By 2001, the Imagination Library had expanded to affiliates in nearly a dozen states. The next year, it extended its reach to 92 Native American communities, partnering with the Cherokee Nation, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Parents as Teachers and the National Center for Family Literacy.

In late 2003, the Imagination Library mailed its one-millionth book. In 2004, it launched its first statewide program – fittingly, in Tennessee.

It added bilingual titles in Spanish and English in 2003 and launched a bilingual Spanish website in 2022. The Imagination Library also supplied audio and braille books for those who needed them beginning in 2011.

Parton celebrated when the library mailed its 100-millionth book in 2018. “We never thought it would be this big,” she told NPR. “I just wanted to do something great for my dad and for my home county and, at the most, maybe a couple of counties over. But then it just took wings of its own.”

The Imagination Library shipped its 200-millionth book in 2023 and its 300-millionth book in 2025. By 2024, 1 in 7 children under the age of 5 in the United States were receiving books for free every month, courtesy of this initiative.

Other programs give free books to young children, including Reach Out and Read in the U.S., which since 1989 has handed them out at children’s medical checkups. Bookstart, which launched in 1992, offers every baby in England, Wales and Northern Ireland a free book and tips on reading aloud to kids.

Program benefits

Parents and caregivers highly praise the program.

Many studies have found that children get excited about getting their own books in the mail, addressed to them personally. Both they and their families also take great pride in book ownership.

“A lot of (children) wait at the mailbox at the first of the month,” Parton told The Washington Post. “They think that I bring the book myself, like I’m Santa Claus.”

As one parent told an education researcher, “We read the books when they come in the mail instead of watching TV.”

The library’s books “nudge” children to make reading a regular habit. Many studies have found that children who are read to more frequently by their loved ones, spend more time reading together daily and ask more frequently for books to be read to them.

This program aims not only to boost a child’s love of reading but to improve their cognitive development and get them ready for elementary school by enlarging their vocabulary and improving their listening skills.

Kids who get the books tend to know more letters, understand how books and printed words work, recognize and retain words’ sounds, and both understand and use more spoken words. Similarly, children enrolled in the program have scored higher than their peers when they take a standard kindergarten entrance early-reading skills test.

In line with Parton’s original goal, the Imagination Library may do the most to change reading habits in lower-income homes – where children’s books tend to be scarce.

Alex H. Poole, Associate Professor of Information Science, Drexel University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.