Two and a half years after launch, Books Unbanned has continued to grow as a vital resource for people in schools and communities where book challenges otherwise put content out of reach.

Since launching Books Unbanned in April 2022, the Brooklyn Public Library has given 8,200 teens and young adults aged 13 to 21, from all 50 U.S. states, full access to its extensive catalog of ebooks, e-audiobooks, and online learning database collections. These cardholders, all of whom have written personal emails explaining their need for access to the library’s collection, have checked out over 270,000 books.

Brooklyn’s Chief Librarian Nick Higgins describes Books Unbanned as having three goals: ensuring that young people across the country who are facing book bans or other access issues in their communities can get content they want or need to read; elevating teen voices and empowering them to tell their stories through programs such as the Intellectual Freedom Teen Meetups launched alongside Books Unbanned; and recapturing some of the public narrative from “the loudest voices in the room trying to ban books.” For this work, Higgins, along with the rest of Brooklyn’s Books Unbanned team—Jackson Gomes, Leigh Hurwitz, Karen Keys, and Amy Mikel—received LJ’s 2023 Librarians of the Year award.

Driven by groups and individuals challenging multiple titles at a time, there were 1,247 book challenges and demands to censor 4,240 unique titles in 2023, according to the American Library Association’s (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom. This was a 65 percent increase over 2022—K–12 libraries saw an 11 percent increase, while public libraries saw a 92 percent increase—and the highest level of censorship efforts ever documented by ALA, according to the organization. Titles describing the lived experiences of Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) and LGBTQIA+ individuals made up almost half of the books targeted in these censorship efforts.

“The freedom to read is a nonpartisan, broadly supported American value,” Higgins told LJ. “It’s a core value of people across the country.” People demanding the removal of books from library shelves are “really in the minority, and people are recognizing these efforts as disruptive and damaging…. It’s time to push back and make sure that we express our rights and expand rights for everyone in this country.”

In response to these needs, the Books Unbanned project has grown, with new partner libraries offering the program with a few different models, all funded by donations to their respective library foundations.* In April 2023, Seattle Public Library (SPL) signed on to the project, offering full access to its ebook and e-audiobook collection to anyone 13 to 26 living anywhere in the United States. Boston Public Library, LA County Library (LACL), and San Diego Public Library (SDPL) joined in September 2023, with SDPL and Boston both offering teens and young adults (12 to 26 at SDPL and 13 to 26 at Boston) from anywhere in the country access to curated collections of frequently challenged and banned ebooks and e-audiobooks. LACL offers access to its full collection of ebooks and e-audiobooks to 13- to 18-year-olds living anywhere in California.

LA County Librarian and CEO Skye Patrick noted that while California is nationally perceived as a very progressive state, “there is somewhat of a political divide between the west side of the state and the east side of the state. You have two very different communities, generally speaking…. We’ve had plenty of challenges here in California following along the same path that you see around the country,” leading to a need for Books Unbanned within the nation’s most populous state. In 2023, 98 titles were challenged in California, up from 87 in 2022, with LGBTQIA+ content facing the most challenges, according to a report by Axios San Diego. In the year since the program’s launch last September, over 1,500 teens in California have signed up for LACL’s Books Unbanned card, checking out nearly 9,000 ebooks and e-audiobooks, Patrick said.

Boston’s Director of Library Services Michael Colford notes that Massachusetts “saw 37 attempts to restrict access to books in public schools and libraries, with 63 titles challenged in those attempts…. We are fortunate in Boston that we have received relatively few book challenges over the past few years. But the Commonwealth is not excluded from this phenomenon.” Regardless, the library viewed joining Books Unbanned as part of its mission. “Combating censorship is at the core of the library’s work, and I believe it is one of the most important issues public libraries are grappling with today,” Colford told LJ. “As we have seen, there is an alarming wave of book challenges and bans throughout the country, posing a serious threat to a healthy democracy, human dignity, and the right to access information, values that the [Boston Public Library] has championed since its origins, as the first free municipal library in the U.S.”

Boston’s program has had 5,640 registrations from all 50 states plus Puerto Rico, Guam, and American Samoa, Colford said. “Out of the teens who have signed up for the Books Unbanned cards, 1,844 patrons have been active, resulting in 10,112 checkouts so far” since last September.

In November 2023, SDPL Director Misty Jones told KBPS, San Diego’s NPR and PBS affiliate, that “A lot of people are still having to hide who they are, and they’re still not able to read about the people who have the same experiences as them because they live in super conservative communities, or they’re not even accepted by their own families. And so this is really what I consider a lifeline for them,” explaining SDPL’s decision to join Books Unbanned. At the time the article was published, SDPL’s program had 470 registrants from states in the Midwest and South less than two full months after launch.

IN THEIR OWN WORDS

This April, SPL and Brooklyn published “In Their Own Words,” a report anonymously documenting many of the stories that teens and young adults had shared with the libraries when requesting to sign up or renew their Books Unbanned cards between April 2022 and December 2023.

“In an era of unprecedented challenges to the freedom to read, this report offers a chance to hear directly from the youth who are most affected,” SPL Chief Librarian Tom Fay said in an announcement. “Their stories document, in heartbreaking and hopeful detail, both the serious impacts of censorship attempts and how programs like Books Unbanned are providing joy, representation, and escape for a new generation of readers.”

The cardholders described living in communities or households where access to certain types of content had been actively or passively restricted. A 19-year-old from Virginia wrote, “There are books that I cannot take home because they would put me in danger. Reading digitally allows me to keep myself safe but still give[s] me the ability to read freely.” In Illinois, a 15-year-old wrote, “In my school, there’s really limited access to books addressing topics that the administrators deem controversial. I was trying to do research for a project last semester about inequality in the United States due to things like sexuality and gender, and I could find almost nothing in my school library that would help.” And a 17-year-old from Texas wrote, “The library closest to me is very underfunded, and it is very conservative. It has a plethora of Christian novels, but their novels surrounding people of color and [other] religions is very limited. As a person of color, it sucks to not be able to see myself in novels I read.”

Books Unbanned libraries have also been providing cards to young people facing other impediments to reading, such as print disabilities or living in rural areas with no access to a local library.

According to a heat map published in the report, (in alphabetical order) California, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Texas had the most total cardholders through the end of 2023, followed by Georgia, Illinois, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and Washington state. A separate heat map indicates that Alaska, Idaho, and Vermont had the most cardholders per 100,000 state residents, followed closely by Maine, Montana, Oregon, and Utah. Other states with a high number of cardholders by population included Alabama, Iowa, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wyoming.

SPL’s Books Unbanned program has more than 10,300 cardholders who have checked out almost 250,000 ebooks and e-audiobooks.

TAKING ACTION

The Books Unbanned libraries have a variety of programs planned for this year’s Banned Books Week, September 22–28. Brooklyn is hosting letter-writing campaigns to politicians, scavenger hunts, documentary screenings, author story times, panel sessions, and more at branches throughout its system. In addition to branch events, LACL is hosting Freedom to Read Student Summits in partnership with PEN America. SPL will hold discussions on the impact of censorship, pop-up book sales, letterpress printing events, and more. In addition to a film screening of Fahrenheit 451, a celebratory gathering, and a creative workshop exploring blackout poetry, Boston is hosting “Let Freedom Read: Banned Book Read-In to Fight Censorship,” a panel discussion featuring authors Cory Doctorow and Leah Johnson, alongside Kelly Brotzman, the executive director of Prison Book Program, discussing the fight against censorship and advocating for the right to read, with a teen facilitator; it will also be livestreamed. And along with libraries, bookstores, and other partners throughout the United States, all Books Unbanned libraries will be participating in the Freedom to Read Day of Action rallies next month on Saturday, October 19.

While book challenges have increased in recent years, Patrick noted that the fight against censorship has always been an ongoing battle. “As long as the libraries have been around…there have been efforts to ban, or restrict, or censor,” she said. “I don’t think it’s going to go away. What I will say is that in the last three to five years, we’ve seen an exponential growth [in challenges]. And not only have we seen exponential growth, we’ve seen more policy behind the bans and more mobilization of communities making it really challenging and difficult as a professional, or as someone who might actually just want to read this material because it resonates with them. That, I think, has been the real issue.”

Higgins emphasized the importance of voting. “Some of the movement is being generated by elected officials who have the power to codify censorship and educational gag orders at the state level,” Higgins said. “That just indicates to me that we need to dust ourselves off and understand that this is the environment that we live in. The freedom to read is an important value to us…. At the very least, go out and vote on November 5th, but also in every other election that we have in our communities and in our states and in our cities, just to make sure that our voices are heard.”

*According to Brooklyn Public Library’s website: “At Brooklyn Public Library “Books Unbanned is generously supported by Harold and Colene Brown Family Foundation, The Destina Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation, Stacee Halsenbalg, The Hilail Gildin Trust, Alan and Linda Kahn Foundation, Long Ridge Foundation, Donald A. Pels Charitable Trust, John Pritzker Family Fund, John Sperling Foundation, Michael and Deborah Ratner Salzberg Family Foundation, Reparations Commission of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, Shawn Carter Enterprises, Diane and Joseph Steinberg, Kerry Washington, Andrea Zaldivar and Michael Festa, and many generous individuals.”