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Comment by mrthrowaway999 | Hacker News Reader

You misunderstand my argument but I'm not sure which part of it is confusing.

> book banning. This source mentions that some books get banned from libraries: https://www.ala.org/bbooks/book-ban-data. But i assume all of these books can be obtained via a bookstore or online retailer. Even if someone argues that it puts books out of reach because of price, I cannot believe that since one can get used books from what for as little as $3-5, or 15 minutes of googling can give them access to PDFs and epubs to tens of thousands of public domain books or millions(?) pirated books that can be read on tablets and phones which have saturated everyone's hands.

You seem to be arguing that library book bans are innocuous, because one can simply find the books elsewhere.

Is that correct?

Book “bans” are indeed innocuous because they’re not bans at all unless it is legally codified into law. Any and all decisions to remove books from a library is called curation and is in fact perfectly reasonable.

Book publishers seem to find fault with your argument, as the book bans appear to be rooted in law.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93pe9p5479o

Yes. To elaborate, I think the effect of bans is so small that it's probably not even measurable because we have become amazingly good at distributing textual information.

That does not argue for shutting down libraries. It doesn't make an argument for what to do with libraries at all.

> because we have become amazingly good at distributing textual information.

Have we?

The costs to doing so have certainly gone down, but the entire de facto system is much more centralized than its physical-based precursor was.

Once a physical book was created, it existed until it was destroyed.

In contrast, all digital destruction takes is a takedown notice to the centralized host and ambivalence on the part of anyone else having archived it.

Physical books were persistent by default.

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