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Comment by Koliakis | Hacker News Reader

> As long as you are able to do that, is it truly censoring? No ones burning books here. To say the publishing industry is especially censoring today than before is outrageous. The point is that it self censored in the ethnicity and gender of its authors instead of the material.

I've been trying to get the older Seuss books. They're impossible to get. And if one of them does happen to be available, the prices are astronomical. I do think there's some level of censorship happening here and I get inklings of book burning when I consider how difficult it is to get these books.

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| if one of them does happen to be available, the prices are astronomical

Yes, they're out of print and the only people who want them are collectors, so the prices for collectibles are high. That's not unusual.

What are you proposing be done? Force the Seuss Foundation to publish books it doesn't want to publish?

I would prefer that any book that has not been in print for 10 years automatically fall into public domain as abandoned.

You’d need some rule voiding publication contracts and reverting rights to the author - otherwise unethical publishers might try to game the system to get works into the public domain to avoid royalties if something seems likely to be rediscovered due to a tie-in or another work by that author becoming popular.

The Seuss foundation is free to stop publishing the books. I don’t see how that creates an obligation for Amazon or eBay to prohibit sale, nor for any library that was happily lending these last week to pull them from circulation entirely.

After all of this, it is considerably easier to procure the writings of Adolf Hitler than of Dr. Seuss. That is very strange and wrong.

Did anyone say it creates an obligation for Amazon or eBay to ban them? Those companies chose to do so voluntarily under their existing policies, which used to be a thing conservatives supported.

The Mein Kampf comparisons also tend to leave out two key factors: most of Dr. Seuss’ books are intended for children and they’re presented without critical analysis. I don’t think you’d find much objection to the same kind of scholarly work discussing Seuss’ works in the historical context – Dr. Seuss Goes to War being a good example of what that might look like.

I wouldn't call myself a conservative. Obviously as private companies, Amazon and eBay are able to make rules about what they allow to be sold. I do think it creates a real chilling effect when both Amazon and eBay refuse to sell these books, since they are essentially an oligopoly in book sales.

It's actually the libraries pulling them from the shelves that seems so bizarre to me. I could understand them moving them from the children's section to somewhere else, but to remove them from circulation entirely, and then presumably put a bunch of other books out on the table for banned books week is just strange.

Public libraries have historically been a big institutional force for the rights of free speech and free thought, fighting in court to be able to loan out (and keep secret the names of borrowers) very controversial books. I honestly cannot understand sacrificing those principles and all of that history over Dr. Seuss.

It's less whether you're a conservative than that almost all of the people pushing this as a story are, and they're doing it with the intention of politicizing it so you really want to look for primary sources and make sure that critical details aren't being removed.

Librarians are generally quite opposed to banning books and I haven't seen any sign that this is different: some large systems (e.g. NYPL) have said they're keeping them in the general collection and others (e.g. Chicago) have said that they're temporarily removing them from circulation while deciding what to do long-term. I would bet that the major of local decisions will end up being along the lines of either not shelving them in the children's section or having some kind of contextual note for people who request it.

Well I'm not so interested in the meta-political aspect to this. What I think this shows though is that perhaps librarians aren't quite as opposed to banning books anymore as I thought they were.

It's easy for Chicago to say that they're figuring out what to do long term, but somehow these books were all fine (and in the children's section!) for something like 70 years, and now they're suddenly radioactive.

What this suggests to me is that there has been a shift in values among librarians, and when the publisher made the decision to take them out of print, this forced a reevaluation, and then we discovered that avoiding any whiff of racism is a more important value than free speech. I think that's really sad and depressing.

> Yes, they're out of print because the only people who want them are collectors

What now? That's not what's going on here at all.

Typo on my part, should read

| Yes, they're out of print and the only people who want them are collectors

A few days ago they were one of the top torrents on a high seas themed site. I archived them if for no other reason than because I’ve been told that I shouldn’t.

Nobody is telling you you shouldn’t archive them. The publishers decided they weren’t comfortable selling them to be shown to children. I’m personally glad that you’ve helped preserve these once-beloved cultural artifacts. However, I’d hope that anyone would hesitate to give these particular books to children in 2021.

It would be one thing if the publisher just stopped printing them. As pointed out in the article they were banned from eBay (a dubious honour achieved not even by Mein Kampf), and removed from libraries.

In terms of giving these to children - I'd argue that this is the parent's decision to make and that there are far worse things we are seem to be ok exposing children to, like advertising or social media.

eBay only allows annotated versions of Mein Kampf.

>Nobody is telling you you shouldn’t archive them.

while technically true this is also essentially wrong, if someone stops selling something for moral reasons then they are strongly implying you are immoral for acquiring the thing they have stopped selling; and it is a necessary component of the immoral that one should not have the immoral, transmit the immoral, commit the immoral or otherwise partake of the immoral.

> Nobody is telling you you shouldn’t archive them. The publishers decided they weren’t comfortable selling them to be shown to children.

Unless they donated the book rights to the public domain, they literally are telling you exactly that.

I've been trying to get a Hugo award winner and the paperback was selling for $400. Sometimes old books are just hard to find. Dr Seuss wrote 60 books, its no surprise that not all are currently publish. You'll find this is also true of Isaac Asimov

Did you try archive.org? I was curious what the concern was with some titles and was able to find a couple there.

People are buying them to resell to all the chuds. It’s not some grand plot.

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