Important to note that "banned" here means "a school chose not to have this book in their library".
It's an annoying abuse of language. "Banned Books" has historically meant people are getting arrested for possessing the books or stores are being prevented from selling it or publishers are being prevented from producing it.
This is essentially a clickbait title for "People disagree about what is age-appropriate content for a public school to provide to children".
>The report also found that challenges are becoming more coordinated and politically driven: 92% came from pressure groups, decision-makers or government officials, compared with 72% in 2024. By contrast, 2.7% were attributed to parents and 1.4% to individual library users.
So this isn't librarians, parents or even neighbours deciding something isn't appropriate.
The article also seems to refer to libraries in general, as opposed to school libraries alone, except on a specific paragraph.
The web site says: "The ALA defines a “challenge” as an attempt to remove or restrict access to a library resource, while a “ban” refers to the removal of materials from a library"
Page 10 of the report has a chart that breaks down what type of people are responsible for an 'attempt to remove' books from a library. Librarians themselves are not listed as one of the groups:
It seems they only count it as 'censorship' or a 'challenge' if it's someone other than a librarian taking the action.
If I've understood correctly, if librarians (alone or in groups) decide that certain books should not be procured, the ALA would count this as a censorship or ban.
> ALA defines a “ban” as the removal of materials from a library based on the objections of a person or group. A “challenge” is an attempt to have a library resource removed, or access to it restricted, based on the objections of a person or group.
Under that definition, it doesn't seem to me like it would be possible for a "ban" to happen without also being a "challenge".
Sibling comments have made their point. I'll just add:
“But the book was on the shelf…”
“On the shelf? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find it.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the book, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on a shelf in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
While true, that is the same reasoning when people said that it isn't censorship if government isn't one actor involved or it isn't censorship if you just de-platform people.
It fails to grasp the core issue, where some people have the ambition to act as a barrier to information. The implementation is secondary. You are correct that a school library is a very poor case or an invalid one of course. The general tendency for more censorship is probably real though. I wouldn't expect a Guardian article if the books were associated with different political leaning though.
If I 'choose not to let you post on my website' would you consider this a ban? This reads like a really dishonest shifting of the goalpost for what is effectively censorship of literature. And, if you look at some of the books that were "chose not to have this book in their library" it overwhelmingly focuses on books that feature queer characters, or discuss these themes. Any honest observer knows exactly what is going on here, and as others have noted, this was not limited to school libraries.
I'd call that "not making publicly available" via the library system rather than banning. As parent said, you can still buy these books and share with or sell them to each other.
I'd call it "banning books from public libraries", since that's a clear description. Contrary to what GP claimed, this is indeed public libraries, not just school libraries.
Whatever you want to call it, IMO public libraries shouldn't ban books, especially based on some radical PAC's opinions about what jesus would want or whatever.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-65794363
The author John Green who was top of a recent list said that the Bible was number 6 on the list.
As other comments have pointed out, a "ban" is where a library has chosen not to stock a book for reasons including response to a complaint. If school library serves children up to the age of 13, then certain explicit fiction is not appropriate and would be expected to be removed.
Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail, or White Identity by Jared Taylor, never make these banned book lists. They don't have to be "banned" - libraries simply make them unavailable, so they get to control information, without being the kind of horrible people that would censor or ban a book. How virtuous!
Any given library is failing to make most books that have ever been printed in human history available, because it would be completely intractable to do so. Any given library management can always claim that a book they don't make available because they disapprove of it, is in the vast class of books they haven't even thought about including in their library. People will only even bring a complaint if a specific book becomes politically salient for some reason - which might be because a book was available at a library and then was removed; and this means that banned book lists are inherently political documents that serve to highlight specific books that the list-compiler thinks are unfairly suppressed. There's no meaningful difference between a library not stocking Gender Queer and a library not stocking Camp of the Saints; all that matters is what the political sensibilities are of the person or organization putting together the banned book list and deciding what titles to include on it.
> all that matters is what the political sensibilities are of the person or organization putting together the banned book list and deciding what titles to include on it.
And the political sensibilities of those deciding which books will be available don't matter? What a convenient position. Would you still hold it if it was the John Birch Society that supplied all librarians?
All those challenged books that talk about systemic this or that, yet when it comes to libraries themselves, you want to pretend they're purely neutral, technocratic establishments. Well, almost - it's okay to want to disrupt whiteness in libraries [1] - they're not neutral then, and we can care about their political sensibilities. But when it comes to criticism from the other political direction, we use doublethink so systems and institutions again cannot be biased.
I don't think libraries are neutral technocratic establishments at all. I don't think the American Library Association is neutral either, nor do I think this is true of their list of banned books. There's a reason why they have Gender Queer on it and not Camp of the Saints, and it has to do with their politically-motivated criteria for what institutions curating books they see as important, but also what actual books their membership does and does not object to.
The flashpoint is usually sexually explicit passages or writing in popular new books. I haven’t thought enough to have an opinion whether libraries (and city vs public school library is unclear) should fight to protect literary depictions of blowjob or rimming or anal intercourse, particularly in an LGBT lens, but enough groups evidently decided they have, and here we are.
Yeah, I'd say a political pressure group's personal preferences (sexual or otherwise) don't alone constitute a good reason to ban information from a public library.
Really makes you wonder if the pressure groups behind these bans really understand the point of a library. To consume only information you like and agree with? To go read 10 different perspectives of something, but only if they are all identical to your current perspective? To minimize risk of mind expansion?
It's hard to see a good reason against whatever is legal to have there: Moonshining; every religion's religious book; the Anarchist Cookbook; a howto on adult nude modeling; hacking; Grey's Anatomy; Catcher in the Rye; etc.
If public policy allows it, public libraries should allow it. If a subset of the public doesn't like that, they can change public policy to make the content illegal.
During the Third Reich the list "des schädlichen und unerwünschten Schrifttums" that startet in 1935 had 12400 banned books and 149 authors in it.
Today there is an "Index jugendgefährdender Medien", that covers not only books.
That's for selling or borrowing to minors.
There is ban of raw depiction of violence / war crimes if certain boundaries are left (e.g. using it solely for entertainment).
Everything else sounds false.
Even the documentary / art project "Kassler Liste" (documenta / Universität Kassel, Germany) doesn't list more books for Germany than there were banned books in Nazi Germany.
https://www.kasselerliste.com/
As someone not from the US, this fingerpointing and the " i don't care 'their' books are being banned as long as 'my' books are being banned" is so weird to me.
You guys should care books from either side of your political spectrum are being banned!
This is an example of "DARVO" [0] – Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. Readers will notice that the post itself literally follows each of the instructions in order.
IMHO it doesn't make for particularly interesting or pleasant discussion. But you're free to not care about what you don't care about, and free to provide (or not) any explanation or pretext for it.
It's also incredibly sad because it's falling into the all-too-common pattern of ascribing the actions of corporate authoritarians to "the left", thereby framing "the right" as some kind of alternative when it's really that same corporate authoritarianism but without even the pretense.
Do you know who needs to start banning "books"? Amazon. They truly need to start finding a way to ban bullshit books and lousy books printed on demand --it's a racket and they just don't seem to care.
Can they not hire some people to curate titles to ensure they are legit and anyone doing a bait and switch gets banned from the site altogether. It's not like they can't ID bad actors.
My sole comment is that people who use verbiage like this are mentally ill. Not "mentally ill" like I'm calling them an epithet. But like, actually mentally ill.
There are things that are simply not pedagogically useful in the limited instructional period in school. There are things that are simply not appropriate during early childhood development.
People who abuse and manipulate language like this are exactly why more traditional instruction is desired in certain school districts. Postmodernism is wrong. There are actually things that are true without the miasma of an artificial (and exhausting) social construction of reality.
Important to note that "banned" here means "a school chose not to have this book in their library".
It's an annoying abuse of language. "Banned Books" has historically meant people are getting arrested for possessing the books or stores are being prevented from selling it or publishers are being prevented from producing it.
This is essentially a clickbait title for "People disagree about what is age-appropriate content for a public school to provide to children".
Depends on your definition of people:
>The report also found that challenges are becoming more coordinated and politically driven: 92% came from pressure groups, decision-makers or government officials, compared with 72% in 2024. By contrast, 2.7% were attributed to parents and 1.4% to individual library users.
So this isn't librarians, parents or even neighbours deciding something isn't appropriate.
The article also seems to refer to libraries in general, as opposed to school libraries alone, except on a specific paragraph.
Why do you assume librarians aren't part of the 'government official's group?
The linked website has further information. It splits the 92% into boards, elected officials and pressure groups.
That and, have you met librarians? They aren't conspiring to censor Sarah Maas, I can tell you that.
The web site says: "The ALA defines a “challenge” as an attempt to remove or restrict access to a library resource, while a “ban” refers to the removal of materials from a library"
Page 10 of the report has a chart that breaks down what type of people are responsible for an 'attempt to remove' books from a library. Librarians themselves are not listed as one of the groups:
It seems they only count it as 'censorship' or a 'challenge' if it's someone other than a librarian taking the action.
If I've understood correctly, if librarians (alone or in groups) decide that certain books should not be procured, the ALA would count this as a censorship or ban.
> ALA defines a “ban” as the removal of materials from a library based on the objections of a person or group. A “challenge” is an attempt to have a library resource removed, or access to it restricted, based on the objections of a person or group.
Under that definition, it doesn't seem to me like it would be possible for a "ban" to happen without also being a "challenge".
The article is indeed very careful to never tell us how much of this is school libraries.
Sibling comments have made their point. I'll just add:
“But the book was on the shelf…”
“On the shelf? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find it.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the book, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on a shelf in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
Amazing that choice of curricula for elementary schoolchildren draws such a reaction.
Kids can read whatever they and their parents want. Schools don't have to teach it.
While true, that is the same reasoning when people said that it isn't censorship if government isn't one actor involved or it isn't censorship if you just de-platform people.
It fails to grasp the core issue, where some people have the ambition to act as a barrier to information. The implementation is secondary. You are correct that a school library is a very poor case or an invalid one of course. The general tendency for more censorship is probably real though. I wouldn't expect a Guardian article if the books were associated with different political leaning though.
If I 'choose not to let you post on my website' would you consider this a ban? This reads like a really dishonest shifting of the goalpost for what is effectively censorship of literature. And, if you look at some of the books that were "chose not to have this book in their library" it overwhelmingly focuses on books that feature queer characters, or discuss these themes. Any honest observer knows exactly what is going on here, and as others have noted, this was not limited to school libraries.
Yeah, it's a word game. The other side does it? Evil banning. We do it? Morally correct curation.
I remember one time some libraries banned non-equity-promoting books and then backtracked and called it "deaccession" https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/peel-school-board-lib...
Right wing and left wing people love roleplaying as freedom fighters against the forces of evil.
This is incorrect. The article is talking about book bans at public libraries and school libraries alike.
The linked censorship search portal [0] lets you filter by "# Count of Challenges at Public Libraries" > 0.
0 – https://www.ala.org/bbooks/censorship-search-portal
I'd call that "not making publicly available" via the library system rather than banning. As parent said, you can still buy these books and share with or sell them to each other.
I'd call it "banning books from public libraries", since that's a clear description. Contrary to what GP claimed, this is indeed public libraries, not just school libraries.
Whatever you want to call it, IMO public libraries shouldn't ban books, especially based on some radical PAC's opinions about what jesus would want or whatever.
I mean you can find scripture and if anyone has read that it’s not for children. Yet no objections
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-65794363 The author John Green who was top of a recent list said that the Bible was number 6 on the list. As other comments have pointed out, a "ban" is where a library has chosen not to stock a book for reasons including response to a complaint. If school library serves children up to the age of 13, then certain explicit fiction is not appropriate and would be expected to be removed.
People object to scripture all the time. You're arguably doing it right now.
Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail, or White Identity by Jared Taylor, never make these banned book lists. They don't have to be "banned" - libraries simply make them unavailable, so they get to control information, without being the kind of horrible people that would censor or ban a book. How virtuous!
Any given library is failing to make most books that have ever been printed in human history available, because it would be completely intractable to do so. Any given library management can always claim that a book they don't make available because they disapprove of it, is in the vast class of books they haven't even thought about including in their library. People will only even bring a complaint if a specific book becomes politically salient for some reason - which might be because a book was available at a library and then was removed; and this means that banned book lists are inherently political documents that serve to highlight specific books that the list-compiler thinks are unfairly suppressed. There's no meaningful difference between a library not stocking Gender Queer and a library not stocking Camp of the Saints; all that matters is what the political sensibilities are of the person or organization putting together the banned book list and deciding what titles to include on it.
> all that matters is what the political sensibilities are of the person or organization putting together the banned book list and deciding what titles to include on it.
And the political sensibilities of those deciding which books will be available don't matter? What a convenient position. Would you still hold it if it was the John Birch Society that supplied all librarians?
All those challenged books that talk about systemic this or that, yet when it comes to libraries themselves, you want to pretend they're purely neutral, technocratic establishments. Well, almost - it's okay to want to disrupt whiteness in libraries [1] - they're not neutral then, and we can care about their political sensibilities. But when it comes to criticism from the other political direction, we use doublethink so systems and institutions again cannot be biased.
[1] Disrupting Whiteness in Libraries and Librarianship: A Reading List - https://www.library.wisc.edu/gwslibrarian/bibliographies/dis...
I don't think libraries are neutral technocratic establishments at all. I don't think the American Library Association is neutral either, nor do I think this is true of their list of banned books. There's a reason why they have Gender Queer on it and not Camp of the Saints, and it has to do with their politically-motivated criteria for what institutions curating books they see as important, but also what actual books their membership does and does not object to.
What do you think might motivate every competent librarian in the entire country to participate in such a grand conspiracy?
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> What people should look at before being up in arms, is which books were banned and why they were banned.
Okay, I'll bite: why were they banned?
Banning books from a public library is prima facie bad, so each one would need to have a pretty compelling argument articulated for why it wasn't.
What if "why they were banned" isn't a good reason for banning information from a public library?
> Okay, I'll bite: why were they banned?
The flashpoint is usually sexually explicit passages or writing in popular new books. I haven’t thought enough to have an opinion whether libraries (and city vs public school library is unclear) should fight to protect literary depictions of blowjob or rimming or anal intercourse, particularly in an LGBT lens, but enough groups evidently decided they have, and here we are.
Yeah, I'd say a political pressure group's personal preferences (sexual or otherwise) don't alone constitute a good reason to ban information from a public library.
Really makes you wonder if the pressure groups behind these bans really understand the point of a library. To consume only information you like and agree with? To go read 10 different perspectives of something, but only if they are all identical to your current perspective? To minimize risk of mind expansion?
How far do you push ‘information’?
As long as it’s written, fair game? Pictures? Web content?
I don’t want the job, but it’s ripe for arguing.
It's hard to see a good reason against whatever is legal to have there: Moonshining; every religion's religious book; the Anarchist Cookbook; a howto on adult nude modeling; hacking; Grey's Anatomy; Catcher in the Rye; etc.
If public policy allows it, public libraries should allow it. If a subset of the public doesn't like that, they can change public policy to make the content illegal.
Which ones? Source?
Sounds more like an alt-right conspiracy.
During the Third Reich the list "des schädlichen und unerwünschten Schrifttums" that startet in 1935 had 12400 banned books and 149 authors in it.
Today there is an "Index jugendgefährdender Medien", that covers not only books. That's for selling or borrowing to minors. There is ban of raw depiction of violence / war crimes if certain boundaries are left (e.g. using it solely for entertainment).
Everything else sounds false.
Even the documentary / art project "Kassler Liste" (documenta / Universität Kassel, Germany) doesn't list more books for Germany than there were banned books in Nazi Germany. https://www.kasselerliste.com/
So, sod off with your alt-right conspiracy.
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As someone not from the US, this fingerpointing and the " i don't care 'their' books are being banned as long as 'my' books are being banned" is so weird to me.
You guys should care books from either side of your political spectrum are being banned!
Not everyone has the money to buy whatever book they want to read and it's wrong no matter who does it.
This is an example of "DARVO" [0] – Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. Readers will notice that the post itself literally follows each of the instructions in order.
IMHO it doesn't make for particularly interesting or pleasant discussion. But you're free to not care about what you don't care about, and free to provide (or not) any explanation or pretext for it.
0 – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO
It's also incredibly sad because it's falling into the all-too-common pattern of ascribing the actions of corporate authoritarians to "the left", thereby framing "the right" as some kind of alternative when it's really that same corporate authoritarianism but without even the pretense.
We wont need books in the future. You'll just open up your Red OpenAI or Blue Claude app and ask it for a new story !
No you will tell it make X into a live action tv show.
List?
Do you know who needs to start banning "books"? Amazon. They truly need to start finding a way to ban bullshit books and lousy books printed on demand --it's a racket and they just don't seem to care.
Can they not hire some people to curate titles to ensure they are legit and anyone doing a bait and switch gets banned from the site altogether. It's not like they can't ID bad actors.
My sole comment is that people who use verbiage like this are mentally ill. Not "mentally ill" like I'm calling them an epithet. But like, actually mentally ill.
There are things that are simply not pedagogically useful in the limited instructional period in school. There are things that are simply not appropriate during early childhood development.
People who abuse and manipulate language like this are exactly why more traditional instruction is desired in certain school districts. Postmodernism is wrong. There are actually things that are true without the miasma of an artificial (and exhausting) social construction of reality.