From Book Riot:
As we race toward the end of 2023 and book bans continue to be a major reality across the country, it seems worth pausing to think about some of the trends across the landscape this year. We have seen shifts in the kinds of books being targeted, thanks to the work of PEN America, and we have seen a shift in the targets of censors more broadly from individual titles (those still happen!) to book distributors with the Texas READER Act and book fairs. While bigotry and power are two key themes of why censors are targeting books, one thing we should be looking at and addressing by name is this: there is a lot of money to be made with book bans.
I’ve talked at length for years about how book banners have found this a prime opportunity to point to wasteful spending of tax money. If they can complain about books in the schools, they can complain their tax money was wasted on the books, then that their tax money was wasted on the review process, and then they can take these claims to sympathetic politicians in their state to demand voucher programs, which then further defund and hard public institutions. They own the entire cycle. We haven’t touched on how many tens of thousands of dollars have been wasted on policies and how they’ve been translated at the public library level (see Hamilton East Public Library’s review of all their YA books, followed by the abrupt ending of that policy).
But a new and frankly unsurprising trend in 2023 is that private entities have stepped in to offer solutions to banned books. These are not solutions to end book bans, but rather ways to continue living in a system that permits books to be banned for lies perpetrated by right-wing parental right groups (no matter how many times book banners push the same handful of images from Gender Queer on social media or in school board meetings, those don’t meet the legal definition of obscenity; they just make you look incredibly ignorant about how books, literacy, and the law work). In 2023, book banners have started to cash in on their own lies, once again owning the entire outrage cycle and its money from start to finish.
Who has been behind this? I’ve already covered two of the biggest, most marketed to date here: BookmarkED, an app designed to “help schools and parents with book bans,” and the Brave Books-now-SkyTree book fairs designed to offer an alternative to Scholastic. The first was created by an individual who was advocating for a book ban bill at the Texas Senate this year. Convenient that he would be able to really push his new app as a solution to the bill. The second, of course, has put Kirk Cameron and a cadre of right-wing “children’s books” at the center of discourse over naughty books available in school and public libraries (and hey, even if the storytime events that Brave Books coordinated in August at public libraries across the U.S. were free, they were certainly getting plenty of press and attention for the publisher and their books, both during the event and in the coverage leading up to it — the tone of that coverage didn’t matter, since they got their goals into people’s mouths).
Link to the rest at Book Riot
PG suggests that the author of the OP has gone more than a bit overboard on the topic.
PG doubts that BookmarkedED and SkyTree Book Fairs are part of some evil right-wing conspiracy to make money off of school book fairs so much as they are a practical solution for school administrators trying to avoid angry parents who don’t think some books being promoted by Scholastic are right for their children.
Scholastic is the world’s largest publisher and distributor of children’s books, NASDAQ: SCHL, and is headquartered in New York City.
New York City is, of course, part of an entirely different and much smaller world than Cleveland, Topeka, Atlanta, Phoenix, Kansas City, and similarly populated urban, suburban and rural areas across the United States.
PG was reminded of one of his friends who was an executive in the Chicago office of a large advertising agency headquartered in New York City. PG’s friend was constantly aggravated by the stupid advertisements cooked up in NYC that were entirely tone-deaf and useless for selling products to anyone in the United States who lived more than fifty miles from NYC.
Finally, countless would-be authors will understand the NYC defacto book bans created and enforced by the many traditional publishers against authors of all sorts of books who conclude, “This isn’t quite right for us.”
Perhaps the author of the OP believes that librarians, schools, and other book purchasers don’t have the right to say, “This isn’t quite right for us.”
PG’s friend was constantly aggravated by the stupid advertisements cooked up in NYC that were entirely tone-deaf and useless for selling products to anyone in the United States who lived more than fifty miles from NYC.
I would love to know how much the lawyers and public relations people charged Harvard, MIT, and Penn for providing expert advice on handling last week’s Congressional hearing.
This.
Esp. in light of the fact that many of the big name consulting firms have started announcing hiring issues from the Ivies… 🙂
Probably not lawyers. Nothing that those three said even touched on illegality. (They weren’t on the hot seat for their enrollment policies, many of which, explicit or implicit, are illegal.)
The public relations people at big institutions (of which universities are only a very small subset) are just as insulated from reality as their bosses.
Lawyers or PR types isn’t who they should’ve talked to before throwing gasoline of the pyre of their reputation.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/crisis-pr-expert-calls-testimony-of-elite-college-presidents-an-embarrassment-that-could-ve-been-avoided/ar-AA1lezkD?cvid=6bd3f6cfe1cc4faa9ed7572ea8b26c84&ei=18
The smarter (or less foolish) one is the one who “quit” (while remaining on her tenured gravy train).
The ones thinking they can ride out the mess on the back of their professors’ support don’t understand their position. Their institutions are cash rich but losing $1B donations is going to sting. And their grads getting blacklisted, even if only a threat, is going to demand a sacrificial goat, even if everybody knows the gesture will change nothing.
Too full of themselves to understand their “values” aren’t the only ones that matter.
And that applies equally to the OP and the whining librarians who don’t accept that there is a higher authority than their “judgment”.
That kind of thinking never ends well.
Perhaps the author of the OP believes that librarians, schools, and other book purchasers don’t have the right to say, “This isn’t quite right for us.”
That’s not quite it. The author of the OP fervently believes in the rights of government employees to make decisions about what books should be available to the public for free or what books children should be required to read in school. What the author of the OP disagrees with is the idea that there should be any kind of outside oversight of said decisions.