As many as 42 percent of American children come from families without the “luxury” disposable income to purchase new books, according to a NYTimes “Fixes” blog post, and tens of millions of families have no books at home at all. David Bornstein (How To Change The World) writes that in some low-income neighborhoods it’s difficult to even find books to buy, with only “one book for sale for every 300 children.” Bornstein cites studies that show that having access to books in the home is the singles biggest predictor of later academic success and literacy, even surpassing “occupation or the family’s standard of living.”

Bornstein’s blog focuses on the good work done by First Book Marketplace, an organization that helps publishers market their children’s books at greatly reduced rates to low-income families, schools, literary programs, reading groups, and family shelters.

First Book positions itself as a commercially viable organization as well as socially beneficial one. Co-founder Kyle Zimmer says, “Not only are we losing 42 percent of kids whose families can’t afford books; the industry isn’t reaching 42 percent of its potential market.” First Book’s executive director Chandler Arnold puts it this way:

What we want to do is unabashedly change the way our country educates our hardest to reach children — and do it in a way that generates revenues for the publishing industry so that they take it up.

So far the group has distributed nearly 85 million books.