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Comment by camjohnson26 | Hacker News Reader

It’s odd that truly offensive titles like Mein Kampf are missing. This study relies on self reported figures so may not tell the full story. This is also interesting: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/pvbkug/what_is_a...

Nothing about censoring COVID information either. https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-quietly-removes-coronavir...

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When librarians speak of banned books, they are talking about books other people wanted banned, not the books librarians themselves wanted banned.

Harry Potter gets on these lists because some christian groups in America demanded that librarians remove the book from their shelves, while the librarians didn't want to. But books that the librarians themselves chose to not stock don't get on the list, because to a librarian, a librarians job is to select which books to stock and which not to. You are very unlikely* to find a copy of Myth of the 20th Century on the shelves of your local public library, not because of external pressure but because the librarians themselves think that people shouldn't read it. And to librarians, that is not banning.

*(I checked. Of the two library systems I have a card for, one doesn't have it and the other has a single copy in German, which they won't let you check out, but no copies in English. Since this is an American library, the German copy would be inaccessible to huge swaths of the population anyway.)

Does anyone even want to read that book though? It would be more interesting if there was some widely read book that wasn't available.

All of the books on the NPR list are available at my local library and Amazon. Seems ridiculous to call them the most banned books in that case.

The Anarchist’s cookbook is on Amazon but not my local library for example.

Most people don't want to read most earnestly banned books. It's a very notorious book though, it would probably garner more attention than many uncontroversial books in the long tail of most library collections, which are neither loved nor hated, notorious nor famous.

But a lot of the people interested in reading it would probably have right wing inclinations, and the average librarian doesn't want to support that sort of thing (not least because the nazis themselves were big on book burning..)

I would not be surprised to learn that modern librarians have permanently destroyed and lost more books in the past five years than the Nazis did in their entire reign.

Most of it is less nakedly ideological - its presented as necessary due to the collection size - but certainly not all of it. There are many famous cases if you Google it, and it is happening quietly all the time on the local scale. Talk to your local librarian - I was shocked to learn their methodology.

Perhaps a better metric of a "banned" book would be the most requested yet unaccepted book.

> (I checked. Of the two library systems I have a card for, one doesn't have it and the other has a single copy in German, which they won't let you check out, but no copies in English. Since this is an American library, the German copy would be inaccessible to huge swaths of the population anyway.)

If you really want to test your hypothesis out, a simple search is not enough. There are tons of books the libraries I'm a member of don't have. However, libraries are often part of networks that will lend or purchase requested books for their members from other libraries or publishers.

Ask a librarian if they can help you borrow or find the book. Chances are they'll help you out or point you to someone who can if they can't.

To be frank, I do not want to get that book nor do I want my name to be in their system as somebody who is interested in that book. A search of their online catalogues through Tor was enough to confirm my suspicion that they would not have the book generally available. My understanding of how librarians think about and consider "banned books" comes from my interactions with a few librarians in my social circle; the search for the book was simply to illustrate my point with an example.

But really, more often, it comes down to budgeting and not taste or personal politics.

I just Googled what the book is and I don't blame you. Point is that libraries act as a network, and if you really want to check out a book, librarians tend to work with you to make it happen.

It's all about books that people read, not books they don't read. Nobody's going to read Mein Kampf because it's a boring screech.

For example, Harry Potter is on the 2019 list of challenged/banned books.

So popular titles are going to get challenged for various reasons.

Remember--Amazon is just a private company, so it's not censorship! Say it three times fast and it becomes true :)

It’s true if you say it only once, or even not at all.

in the age of monopolies - the whole "it's private" has less and less practical meaning. Is it a violation of 1A? No.

should we be reconsidering laws in an age where all ephemeral discussion is gone and near all discussion or communication or media is now permanent and flows through Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter?

Absolutely. The web was never meant to be so centralized and monopolized. The web has "disrupted" so many industries (ie, flat out destroyed them and then consolidated their functions under one of the main web companies), there's decreasing less alternatives for private platforms.

Censoring speech on private platforms was a really different animal 10 years ago.

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