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The banned books part is besides the point.

> allows anyone across the country between the ages of 13 and 21 to get a free eCard from BPL, which will give them access to 350,000 ebooks and 200,000 audiobooks, as well as access to databases.

The cool part is that BPL made all of their ebooks available to a group of people around the country. All libraries should go this route and not just for teens.

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Id say it's very much the point. I agree this should be more widespread, but unfortunately since the motivation is based on disseminating banned books rather than simply increasing access across the country we won't see that. This is more of a culture war move than a move to vincrease access. Just because it effectively has a positive outcome, doesn't mean it's even close to ideal

I've read too much history to be an idealist about this kind of stuff. If any good change happens for any reason (that isn't seriously harming people) I'm happy about it.

But you should be empirical. Does this change meaningfully impact public literacy? If it helps even a few kids, that’s great. Let us see if this moves the needle. There are opportunity costs with public policy, and so we should try and try to be results oriented when deciding what constitutes “good change.” Look at all of the problems in the world right now which can be directly linked to frivolous and performative policy moves, made with little consideration for the actual impact they have. I will be, very pleasantly, surprised if this does anything more than sow greater cultural division in a hot election cycle.

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