Brooklyn Public Library Offers Free ECards to Teens Nationwide Facing Book Bans | Hacker News Reader

Brooklyn Public Library Offers Free ECards to Teens Nationwide Facing Book Bans

bklynlibrary.org

62 pointsboramalper26 comments

The $50 fee normally associated with out-of-state cards will be waived.

This is the main detail. People from elsewhere can normally get access for a fee but for a limited time they are waiving the fee for this age group.

Only for teenagers*

How does this prevent someone from India accessing ebooks? it would seem not something publishers would be okay with

Publishers have tried to completely eliminate libraries since before libraries existed in the United States. It's not about what publishers want, it's about what's legal in the compromise between authors and the general population that copyright law is.

Seems like they used to. Just tried to register out of state as an adult and got this -

As of July 15, 2022, BPL is no longer offering out of state memberships. BPL library cards remain free for anyone who lives, works, pays property taxes or attends school in New York State.

> For a limited time

April 13 to July 15, 2022. 93 days.

This is from 2022. The offer no longer exists.

Was it because it was also free to teens willing to burn the books?

What happened to the Streisand effect?

Why am I not hearing and seeing more about the books that were banned?

Is it no longer a thing?

Politicians studying history and modeling policy after Stalin. One book banned is a tragedy and news worthy, but banning dozens, hundreds, thousands of book with a common theme is a statistic and just a state's right issue.

The library will also make a selection of frequently challenged books available with no holds or wait times for all BPL cardholders, available through the library's online catalog or Libby app. The titles include: The Black Flamingo by Dean Atta, Tomboy by Liz Prince, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones, Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, and Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison

...The American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom counted more than 700 complaints last year, the most since it began keeping records more than 20 years ago.

The Streisand effect tends to happen when a secret is made public and then there's an effort to bury that secret. So I would say there's absolutely been a Streisand effect here, but just in the other direction. You can find countless videos like this [1], where a parent simply reads from books made available by a school, at a school board meeting. School boards largely responded by simply trying to bury these things - enter, Streisand.

It's not a secret that books like these exist, you can find a million of them with a single search. But the fact that they were on school shelves is certainly something that came as a huge surprise to the overwhelming majority of parents.

[1] - https://twitter.com/gratefulAC19/status/1453174598380441603

Are these books not banned to protect the children? Should other states be allowed to circumvent and subvert protections your state offers children? How about other countries?

No, they’re banned because the people who decided the ban disagree with content that questions their political ideology. For example, this includes a lot of books on racism.

It also includes Gender Queer, a book with graphic illustrations of sex that for some inexplicable reason some people really want 8 year olds to read.

Show me where people explicitly want 8 year olds, or anyone tbh to read a specific book that’s not part of the basic English class curriculum?

Are you aware of what's available on the thing you're posting this comment through? You can't even make a book with content close to as graphic as what's available here. The kids are fine, it's the fascist adults we need to be concerned about.

What's the alternative? Do you really envisage a blockade on books crossing state lines? What's next, Smokey and the Librarian?

To put it less confrontationally - the books are banned from schools and public libraries. They're not banned from private purchase or private ownership. You can give these books, you can gift them, you can sell them, you can loan them. Just not anywhere that's publicly funded.

So there's really no difference between them being available from Brooklyn Library and being available from Amazon. As long as Texas isn't funding the BPL, there's no issue here.

> Should other states be allowed to circumvent and subvert protections your state offers children? How about other countries?

From words? Freedom of speech. So, yes.

"In other cases, such as the Nazi book burnings, copies of the destroyed books survive, but the instance of book burning becomes emblematic of a harsh and oppressive regime which is seeking to censor or silence some aspect of prevailing culture." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_burning

Neve liked the idea of ebooks before, but this puts them in a new light.

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