This blog post is by Micah May, Director of Ebook Services, Digital Public Library of America, a Unite Against Book Bans partner.
Across the country, state and local governments continue to ban books at alarming and increasingly high rates. During the 2023-2024 school year, over 10,000 books were removed from U.S. public schools, according to data collected by PEN America. Targeting children’s picture books and personal memoirs, emerging voices and renowned writers, classic and cherished literature and standard academic texts that have long served as the backbone of school curricula, attempts to censor books and deliberately curtail access to knowledge, diverse perspectives, and different points of view are rampant.
In just the first eight months of this year alone, the American Library Association (ALA) has documented hundreds of attempts “to censor books and materials in public, school, and academic libraries,” affecting more than 1,100 unique titles. It is undeniable that book bans primarily target the voices and stories of those who have been historically silenced: women and girls; Black, Latinx, Asian, Indigenous, and other people of color; the LGBTQIA+ community, particularly trans authors; as well as many other marginalized groups.
These bans have more than just direct effects on stifling the availability of certain titles. They also purposefully push a chilling effect through what the ALA calls “soft censorship,” whereby books are “placed in restricted areas, not used in library displays, or otherwise hidden or kept off limits due to fear of challenges… In some circumstances, books have been preemptively excluded from library collections, taken off the shelves before they are banned, or not purchased for library collections in the first place.”
Last year, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), together with Lyrasis, launched The Banned Book Club in direct response to the banned book crisis facing readers across the country. Its mission is simple: to ensure all readers have access to the books they want to read. Initially, we used GPS-based geo-targeting to grant access to free, digital copies of banned books in the specific communities where those books had been removed from libraries.
As book bans have continued to intensify, however, we realized it wasn’t enough to just allow access in certain regions, or to only certain communities. So we decided to make a change. The Banned Book Club has now made e-versions of banned books available to all readers across the country, totally free of charge, regardless of whether they currently live in an area impacted by book bans or not.
Readers can now freely access over 1,300 titles that have been forcibly removed from schools and libraries through the Palace Marketplace e-reader app. And it’s really easy to do: here’s how.
The Banned Book Club remains committed to guaranteeing our collective freedom to read, to teach, and to learn—not only where threats to those freedoms are most acute right now, but wherever those threats might emerge next.
