Amazon’s practice of purchasing rare and...

Editor's note: ...out-of-print books in bulk, only to slice off their bindings, scan the pages for AI training data, and discard the physical copies, constitutes a shortsighted act of cultural vandalism by a company that once built its empire on books yet now treats irreplaceable texts as disposable raw material. A 404 Media investigation published on August 17, 2026, confirmed this by tracking a bulk order of roughly 1,000 rare and used volumes with a hidden AirTag that arrived at Amazon's VGT3 facility inside the LAS8 warehouse in North Las Vegas, where employees described receiving large pallets of printed books, cutting their bindings to speed scanning, and throwing the remains away. In the wake of country legend Dolly Parton's death, her Imagination Library, which has mailed hundreds of millions of free books to children to foster a lifelong love of reading, underscores that kids deserve real books in their hands, making Amazon's destruction of hard-to-find volumes all the more destructive to that ideal and urging Americans to begin building their own personal libraries of these texts before AI companies erase them forever.
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Dolly Parton's Imagination Library Continues Legacy Of Literacy

By Breccan F. Thies | August 25, 2026

"The seeds of these dreams are often found in books and the seeds you help plant in your community can grow across the world."

Dolly Parton passed away Tuesday at the age of 80, and beyond her significance as a cultural and country music icon, her flagship charity, Imagination Library, continues a legacy that championed literacy in Tennessee, the United States, and the world.

 

Parton started Imagination Library in 1995 in her home county of Sevier, Tennessee, as part of the Dollywood Foundation with the goal of mailing "free, high-quality books to children from birth to age five, no matter their family's income" to children in Sevier.

"Before he passed away, my Daddy told me the Imagination Library was probably the most important thing I had ever done. I can't tell you how much that meant to me because I created the Imagination Library as a tribute to my Daddy. He was the smartest man I have ever known but I know in my heart his inability to read probably kept him from fulfilling all of his dreams," Parton said of the program. "Inspiring kids to love to read became my mission. In the beginning, my hope was simply to inspire the children in my home county but here we are today with a worldwide program that gives a book a month to well over 3 million children."

Although in recent years the book selections have declined in classic literary value and increased in racial consciousness, they otherwise avoid politics and polarizing themes as a rule to stay on the mission of inspiring children to love reading.

As The Federalist's Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway noted in 2016, "Unlike many celebrities who make it big from small-town roots, Parton stayed close to home and invested there." But the program grew rapidly and was replicated in places across the U.S., secured statewide coverage for all of Tennessee's 95 counties, and ultimately expanded to Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Ireland.

Please go to The Federalist to continue reading.
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Related to data centers:

Leaked GOP Memo: Data Centers Politically Toxic, Might Cost Ohio Senate Race

The only blemish on Dolley Parton's long illustrious country singing and acting career was her making the decision to promote and endorse the Covid injection rollout by donating $1 million to Covid research which upset and dismayed a lot of people: