More than a book - We donate a book every time you buy a Librio personalised book.

More Than A Book
For every Librio book you buy, we give an additional book to a child to share the love of reading

How and why we give books

In December 2017, we were approached by a small children’s hospital in Southern Germany. They asked if we could give some personalised books to children in palliative care as a Christmas gift. We couldn’t say no.

Giving those ten books felt amazing and got us thinking, “How can we incorporate giving books into Librio’s DNA?”

Could we match every Librio purchase by giving an additional book to a child with less access to reading materials than our own?

Our criteria for giving books were as follows:

We would only give books to children who actually needed and wanted them
We would only give books as part of a larger program of improving literacy
We would only give books which were culturally relevant for the recipients
We would only give books via a partner who is focussed on genuine, measurable impact rather than providing us an opportunity to tick a marketing box named “Philanthropy”.
We would only give books if it was financially viable given the above criteria. Giving books is great, but only if we don’t put ourselves out of business by doing so.

We honestly didn’t think it would be possible to find a partner who could meet all of those criteria.

Librio and Room to Read

Then we found Room to Read. If Librio were a charity, it would be called Room to Read. Everything we’d thought of doing to distribute books ourselves they’d already been doing for 19 years and had helped over 16 million children along the way. All while rigorously assessing their impact and consistently being rated in the top 1% of US charities for financial responsibility and impact.

And so, after satisfying ourselves that Room to Read is a partner we can rely on to meet our strict criteria, we’re delighted to announce our More Than A Book commitment: We will match every purchase of a Librio book by giving a book to a child via our More Than A Book projects.

The majority will be distributed through Room to Read. However, we will continue to give small numbers of books to projects that are closer to home like those children in Southern Germany who set us on this path.

Ready to give an amazing gift? Twice?

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A note about our previous philanthropic commitment

From November 2017 t o October 2018, Librio donated £1 for every book sold to one of three children’s charities depending on the location of the customer.
In German-speaking countries, we supported Stiftung Theodora, a charity who provides clowns to hospitals to cheer up children in long term care.
In Australia, we supported the ALNF to support literacy projects down under.
In all other countries, we supported the National Literacy Trust in the UK to carry out literacy projects and research.

We greatly appreciate working together with these charities and reluctantly ended our partnership with them. However, we felt that we could achieve a greater good by focussing on one singular mission rather than distributing our resources among multiple charities.

More Than A BookFor every Librio book you buy, we give an additional book to a child to share the love of reading

How and why we give books

Librio and Room to Read

A note about our previous philanthropic commitment

More Than A Book
For every Librio book you buy, we give an additional book to a child to share the love of reading