BAN MY BOOKS, I COULD USE THE SALES BOOST
Sep. 30th, 2008 10:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
defrogIt’s Banned Books Week, incidentally. And as such, I want to call yr attention to this post by John Mark Ockerbloom, a digital library architect and planner at the University of Pennsylvania, on why it matters that we have a Banned Books Week.
It’s not for the reasons you think. Rather:
Put another way, it’s not really about the actual books in question.
This is worth mentioning because nitpicky critics who’ll use semantics just to start an argument love to point out that most if not all of the books on the annual ALA list haven’t actually been banned – they’ve just been challenged, and even if the library caves in, it’s not like you can’t get a Harry Potter book at the nearest Wal-mart. Between Borders, Amazon.com and the used book trade, you can get yr hands on just about any book without the assistance of yr local library. And so on.
Okay. Fair call. On the other hand, as Ockerbloom says, that’s not the point. Neither is the argument over why people defend Catcher In The Rye but not, say, The Turner Diaries. And neither is the red herring that libraries have to make editorial decisions because of limited budgets and shelf space.
For my money, Banned Books Week is important because it represents one of the greatest conflicts within human nature: the ideal of free speech vs the natural instinct to suppress “harmful” ideas. The same could apply to film, TV and music, but written language is the source of our culture, and holds a place so sacrosanct that we generally view book-burning as something only a Nazi would do.
That's why books in particular are comparatively the most unregulated medium we have. Hollywood movies come with a ratings system. CDs come with Parental Advisory stickers. Radio and TV have the FCC issuing fines for showing nipples. Books have none of these things.
That’s real ultimate power. And that’s worth dedicating an entire week to commemorate not the books that people have tried to protect us from, but the ideals of free expression that books embody better than any other medium.
Out of print,
This is dF
It’s not for the reasons you think. Rather:
Banned Books Week is thus about twin freedoms: the freedom to write about what matters to you, and the freedom to read about what matters to you.
Put another way, it’s not really about the actual books in question.
This is worth mentioning because nitpicky critics who’ll use semantics just to start an argument love to point out that most if not all of the books on the annual ALA list haven’t actually been banned – they’ve just been challenged, and even if the library caves in, it’s not like you can’t get a Harry Potter book at the nearest Wal-mart. Between Borders, Amazon.com and the used book trade, you can get yr hands on just about any book without the assistance of yr local library. And so on.
Okay. Fair call. On the other hand, as Ockerbloom says, that’s not the point. Neither is the argument over why people defend Catcher In The Rye but not, say, The Turner Diaries. And neither is the red herring that libraries have to make editorial decisions because of limited budgets and shelf space.
For my money, Banned Books Week is important because it represents one of the greatest conflicts within human nature: the ideal of free speech vs the natural instinct to suppress “harmful” ideas. The same could apply to film, TV and music, but written language is the source of our culture, and holds a place so sacrosanct that we generally view book-burning as something only a Nazi would do.
That's why books in particular are comparatively the most unregulated medium we have. Hollywood movies come with a ratings system. CDs come with Parental Advisory stickers. Radio and TV have the FCC issuing fines for showing nipples. Books have none of these things.
That’s real ultimate power. And that’s worth dedicating an entire week to commemorate not the books that people have tried to protect us from, but the ideals of free expression that books embody better than any other medium.
Out of print,
This is dF
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
on 2008-09-30 11:15 pm (UTC)I kind of hope someone will start a crusade against my books, because then my sales would skyrocket.
no subject
on 2008-10-01 12:54 am (UTC)no subject
on 2008-10-02 06:49 pm (UTC)http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/man-charged-over-girls-aloud-porn-murder-blog-949248.html
Fuck censorship....
on 2009-09-27 07:05 pm (UTC)~M~