With the sharp uptick in challenges to books with LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC subjects and authors, this year’s Banned Books Week (October 1–7) resonates strongly with library staff and users alike. Public, academic, and school libraries from Los Angeles to Maine have launched local anticensorship campaigns—and some, like Brooklyn Public Library's Books Unbanned and New York Public Library's Books for All, are giving access to removed or restricted books nationally. One such initiative, the Digital Public Library of America’s (DPLA) Banned Book Club, has been providing challenged books to readers across the country, via the free Palace e-reader app, since its launch on July 21.

Using GPS-based geotargeting, DPLA has set up virtual libraries in 241 communities across the United States where books have been removed from circulation at libraries. Readers in those places can visit the Banned Book Club website and share their location; if they are in a city or county where access to books has been restricted, they are issued a digital library card enabling them to check out any banned books—currently more than 900 unique titles, and the collection is growing. A recent collaboration between DPLA and the University of Chicago Library will help grow the Banned Book Club’s collection and increase the number of titles it can lend, as well as offering access to the Palace e-reader to all Illinois residents for at least one year.

“DPLA’s mission is about providing access as broadly as possible,” Director of Ebook Services Micah May told LJ. “When book banning started to become more common, we were concerned and wanted to see what we could do.”

BUILDING ON THE PALACE PROJECT

The Banned Book Club is an offshoot of the Palace Project, a nonprofit, open-source library platform and e-reader app for ebooks, audiobooks, and other digital content. A joint initiative developed by DPLA and Lyrasis with the support of a multimillion-dollar investment from the Knight Foundation, the app—available for iOS and Android—launched in June 2022. Within its first month, the Palace Project was adopted by more than 125 libraries, with more than 400 others joining over the following year.

The platform allows librarians to manage their collections, hosting, and circulation in one place, including content from major vendors such as OverDrive, Baker and Taylor, Bibliotheca, and Bibliolabs, while protecting patron privacy. The Palace Marketplace offers a range of flexible licensing models from Big Five and independent publishers, as well as Amazon Publishing, allowing libraries to maximize their budgets for the most diverse range of titles possible. The Palace Bookshelf holds a collection of more than 16,000 items of openly licensed content. Collections are customizable, allowing librarians to build themed shelves that users can browse.

At DPLA, said May, “We had access to the Palace Project, which is this practical tool that puts libraries at the center of their digital service, and saw that we could leverage that for the solution.” The Banned Book Club builds off the Palace Project’s core functionalities, with the addition of a virtual library card that enables users to access titles they would not be able to read at their local libraries.

The app went through several iterations before its July launch, and DPLA consulted with members of Chief Officers of State Library Agencies (COSLA) and librarians in areas that had seen some of the most prominent book challenges. Whether libraries could explicitly endorse the Banned Book Club depended on their local politics, said May. “But ultimately, literally every librarian I spoke with loved it.”

Titles on the Banned Book Club shelves were selected from the “Censorship Attacks” database compiled by researcher and PEN America consultant Dr. Tasslyn Magnusson and hosted by the EveryLibrary Institute, which lists more than 8,000 instances of book challenges. “I think projects like DPLA’s are so important,” Magnusson told LJ. “As access is diminished in fundamental real ways, we really need to find ways to both fight censorship (PEN America and EveryLibrary do this so well) and create new avenues to let books reach readers.”

DPLA narrowed down the list to titles that have been completely removed—rather than reshelved or given age restrictions—from libraries. “These are all books that a librarian selected and bought, and had on their shelf, and then was forced by some community members to remove access,” said May. Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer leads the list books users can check out, which also includes Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Beloved, Jesse Andrews’s Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Susan Kuklin’s Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out, and the graphic novel treatment of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, illustrated by Renee Nault. DPLA expects the collection to top 1,000 titles by the end of Banned Books Week.

“AN END RUN AROUND CENSORSHIP”

The Banned Book Club can be downloaded to a user’s phone, or any web-enabled device that can use ePub or mp3 files, via the Palace Project app in the App Store or Google Play. Users signing into the app for the first time are asked to share their location. The app’s geolocation function, which operates at the city or county level, was first piloted with a group of libraries as part of a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to launch the Palace Project in areas with smaller and rural libraries that didn’t have existing ebook service.

If a user is in an area where books have been banned, they are pinged back with a prompt to create a digital library card—plus a note that location information is not saved after the initial sign-in.

Although the Banned Book Club would like to make its contents available to everyone in the United States, said May, currently access is focused on those areas where books have been banned outright. Because the initiative has a limited budget, and DPLA purchases the titles from publishers on standard digital license terms, “we wanted to prioritize places where access had been actively removed,” he explained.

As is standard with other e-reading apps, users must be 13 or older. “Obviously, if you’re a parent, you can choose to share it with a younger child if you think that’s appropriate,” said May. If a user can’t find a book that has been removed from their local library, they can report it on a Google form; more titles will be added on a rolling basis.

Feedback on the Banned Book Club has been positive from the beginning, and DPLA hopes to find additional sponsorship to help keep the project going, bring in more libraries to join the Palace Project, and expand the number of publishers it works with—particularly those that offer library-friendly licensing. “One of the main reasons we took this on is because, overwhelmingly, these books that have been banned are silencing Black and brown voices and queer voices, LGBTQ perspectives,” said May. “And we really believe in digital as a tool to—in this case—do an end run around that censorship.”