American Library Association records record number of book bans and attempts in 2023

NEW YORK (AP) — Book bans and attempted bans& continue to hit record highs, according to the& American Library Association. And the efforts now extend as much to public libraries as school-based libraries. Through the first eight months of 2023, the ALA tracked 695 challenges to library materials and services, compared to 681 during the same time period last year, and a 20% jump in the number of “unique titles” involved to 1,915. School libraries had long been the predominant target, but in 2023 reports have been near-equally divided between schools and libraries open to the general public, the ALA announced Wednesday. “The irony is that you had some censors who said that those who didn’t want books pulled from schools could just go to the public libraries,”’ says Deborah Caldwell-Stone, who directs the association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. The ALA defines a challenge as a “formal, written complaint filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness.” In 2019, the last pre-pandemic year, the association recorded just 377 challenges, involving 566 titles. The numbers fell in 2020, when many libraries were closed, but have since risen to the most in the association’s...