Banned Books Week is the national book community’s annual celebration of the freedom to read. Hundreds of libraries and bookstores around the country draw attention to the problem of censorship by mounting displays of challenged books and hosting a variety of events. The 2015 celebration will be held September 27-October 3. Publisher’s Weekly brought this news to us in their article, “Banned Books Week Gets a Digital Makeover.”
We wrote about Banned Book Week recently to lift up the awareness of what this event stands for and how you can recognize it properly. The reason for another mention is the different approach being taken this year.
Last year the sponsors behind Banned Books Week began giving the three-decades-old promotion a makeover for the digital age. As a result, the Banned Books Week website drew more than 92,000 users and had more than 207,000 page views in 2014. This year they see even more potential.
For this year’s celebration, the American Booksellers Association (ABA) distributed display kits to 450 booksellers, triple what it gave out two years ago. Publishers are getting involved too. Random House, for one, is encouraging readers to post banned-book selfies and tag @RHLibrary. Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group is offering discounts on their frequently banned titles, and Quirk Books is posting printable warning labels on its website that say “WARNING: May Cause Intellectual Growth and Symptoms of Empathy.”
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
