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Brooklyn Public Library offers access to banned ebooks to teens across the U.S

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Re: Brooklyn Public Library offers access to banned ebooks to teens across the U.S

#81

Post by thaumasiotes »

jasonlotito wrote: post #75
ALittleLight wrote: post #39

I like to use "The Turner Diaries" as a kind of litmus test for people who don't want to ban books. I notice that, while all of the books this article calls out specifically are available at the Brooklyn Public Library - per their online catalog, "The Turner Diaries" is not and neither are any books by its author - either his real name or pseudonym. The Turner Diaries, for reference, is a white supremacist novel that…

And your qualifications to make this call as opposed to a professional like a librarian are?

> And your qualifications to make this call as opposed to a professional like a librarian are?

This is a... stunningly helpless and pathetic appeal to authority. Librarians are professionals in the field of locating information within a collection. They are not professionals in the field of what books people should or shouldn't read. That is a moral question; the relevant professional would be a priest or similar.

Re: Brooklyn Public Library offers access to banned ebooks to teens across the U.S

#82

Post by vmception »

ALittleLight wrote: post #39

I like to use "The Turner Diaries" as a kind of litmus test for people who don't want to ban books. I notice that, while all of the books this article calls out specifically are available at the Brooklyn Public Library - per their online catalog, "The Turner Diaries" is not and neither are any books by its author - either his real name or pseudonym. The Turner Diaries, for reference, is a white supremacist novel that…

so where is a good example of that litmus test being passed, where self published books are also routinely hosted?

Re: Brooklyn Public Library offers access to banned ebooks to teens across the U.S

#83

Post by jeffbee »

ALittleLight wrote: post #39

I like to use "The Turner Diaries" as a kind of litmus test for people who don't want to ban books. I notice that, while all of the books this article calls out specifically are available at the Brooklyn Public Library - per their online catalog, "The Turner Diaries" is not and neither are any books by its author - either his real name or pseudonym. The Turner Diaries, for reference, is a white supremacist novel that…

I think this choice of litmus test say a great deal about you, and basically nothing about the phenomenon of banned books.

Re: Brooklyn Public Library offers access to banned ebooks to teens across the U.S

#84

Post by thaumasiotes »

ALittleLight wrote: post #69
wfleming wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Turner Diaries is, I think, a poor choice of litmus test for this. It was never picked up by a major publisher, and was basically always self-published as far as I know. Wikipedia gives an estimate of 200k-500k copies sold, total, since 1978: that’s not a lot! Libraries do have to make curatorial choices about what to stock, both physically and digitally. So it’s not surprising a lot of libraries don’t stock a bo…

It would be better to have a suite of controversial books and check those - I agree. That wouldn't really be a "litmus test" though - that would be more of a "test suite" which is a bit more effort than I care to invest in the claims of random groups that they oppose book banning. A litmus test, by definition, has a singular pass/fail check. Regarding the popularity of The Turner Diaries - I believe I already address…

> Similarly, if this article were published by a neo-Nazi institute of religious fundamentalism, I wouldn't be asking them "How about the Turner Diaries?" They would absolutely host that book and complain about it being banned. I'd ask them "How about the 1619 Project?"

A complication that the 1619 Project brings up is that there are different actions which might reasonably fall under the heading of "banning". For example, repeated problems corroborating particular narratives in Elie Wiesel's Night led that book to be stocked in bookstores, but shelved under "fiction". Until someone started raising complaints in the media, at which point there was just as little corroboration but stores started shelving the book under "nonfiction" anyway.

Re: Brooklyn Public Library offers access to banned ebooks to teens across the U.S

#85

Post by SllX »

slg wrote: post #67
temp8964 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public school library != public library

Can you clarify what you are trying to say with this comment? This distinction has no bearing on what I said. The same concept applies to both equally regardless of the current political battle being specifically about school libraries.

I'll chime in here: it's a worthy distinction because one is available to the students and staff of a school and thus is not a "public library", even though it is funded by the public. The other is a library available to the public (generally with a residency requirement as a gatekeeping measure although not necessarily) and funded by the public.

The controversy is about the former, because that is the type being targeted with legislation, and arguably as a controversy it is overblown because it does not overlap with the latter which is also available to children and almost always has a superior selection covering a wider breadth of subject matter and genres with greater depth. There is something to be said about letting librarians at either type just make their own decisions without legislating them, but public schools are right at the intersection of all kinds of messed up policies around the staff and students and curriculum due to the nature of these institutions so this honestly doesn't rate very high. You can't fix that, because fixing that would mean fixing people in general, so the alternative is to sidestep it by sending children to private schools, but then it will just be a different group of people making policy decisions about the staff, students, curriculum and materials accessible to them.

So here's a good litmus test: if you can legally procure and read a book, it is not banned. We don't actually ban books in America, although at points in our history portions of the country or what would become the country did. How accessible, rare, attainable or what condition it is in, well, nothing is guaranteed.

Re: Brooklyn Public Library offers access to banned ebooks to teens across the U.S

#87

Post by ALittleLight »

jeffbee wrote: post #83
ALittleLight wrote: post #39

I like to use "The Turner Diaries" as a kind of litmus test for people who don't want to ban books. I notice that, while all of the books this article calls out specifically are available at the Brooklyn Public Library - per their online catalog, "The Turner Diaries" is not and neither are any books by its author - either his real name or pseudonym. The Turner Diaries, for reference, is a white supremacist novel that…

I think this choice of litmus test say a great deal about you, and basically nothing about the phenomenon of banned books.

If it says a "great deal" then surely you could elaborate beyond a single vague sentence.

Re: Brooklyn Public Library offers access to banned ebooks to teens across the U.S

#88

Post by paxys »

ALittleLight wrote: post #39

I like to use "The Turner Diaries" as a kind of litmus test for people who don't want to ban books. I notice that, while all of the books this article calls out specifically are available at the Brooklyn Public Library - per their online catalog, "The Turner Diaries" is not and neither are any books by its author - either his real name or pseudonym. The Turner Diaries, for reference, is a white supremacist novel that…

Where is the line between banning and just not caring about a book? I have written a book of my own. No library in the world has it. No publisher chose to pick it up. Does that mean I am the most "banned" author in the world? Or maybe people have deemed that what I wrote is just not worth their time?

Re: Brooklyn Public Library offers access to banned ebooks to teens across the U.S

#89

Post by usrn »

gunfighthacksaw wrote: post #32
skepticalwaves wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two Hundred Years Together by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Still waiting to hear Jordan Peterson’s review of that one.

We all are. That little performance bummed me out quite a bit the first time I saw it. I still think his general life advice is good though.

Re: Brooklyn Public Library offers access to banned ebooks to teens across the U.S

#90

Post by ALittleLight »

vmception wrote: post #82
ALittleLight wrote: post #39

I like to use "The Turner Diaries" as a kind of litmus test for people who don't want to ban books. I notice that, while all of the books this article calls out specifically are available at the Brooklyn Public Library - per their online catalog, "The Turner Diaries" is not and neither are any books by its author - either his real name or pseudonym. The Turner Diaries, for reference, is a white supremacist novel that…

so where is a good example of that litmus test being passed, where self published books are also routinely hosted?

I think Library Genesis is an excellent example. As a quick test they host both The Turner Diaries and The 1619 Project.

https://libgen.li/

I would believe the people who run libgen if they said they were against book banning - at least until I discovered the books that they did ban, if there are any.

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