The New York Public Library has partnered with publishers to make certain banned and challenged books available to read for free to anyone that wants to read them.
From the NYPL website:
The New York Public Library stands by the right to read freely. In response to recent efforts to ban certain books in some communities across the United States, the Library is making a selection of commonly banned books available to everyone—for free.
You can read more about the project here on the NYPL website: Books For All: NYPL Supports the Right to Read Banned Books.
The only problem is you have to use the NYPL’s SimplyE app to read the ebooks, so you won’t be able to read them on an E Ink ereader unless you have one that can install Android apps.
Here’s the list of ebooks that are being made available to read for free:
- Speak | Laurie Halse Anderson (Square Fish / Macmillan Publishers)
- King and the Dragonflies | Kacen Callender (Scholastic)
- Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You | Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers / Hachette Book Group)
- Catcher in the Rye | J.D. Salinger (Little, Brown and Company / Hachette Book Group, with special thanks to Matt Salinger)
The above books will be available to read for free from the NYPL through the end of May using their SimplyE app for iOS or Android. The books will be listed in the Books for All Collection so users can get them with or without a library card with no wait lists.
via: MobileRead
Appreciate what the NYPL is trying to do! However, they should provide unlimited access to those banned books instead of the very limited time period. Pretty sure the publishers are behind the limited free access. Let’s not get me started on the high price of ebooks lol. Thanks for the info Nathan! 🙂
This is nice of them to do. But, if your public library owns any banned book titles, they can also be borrowed for free. Everyone should support their library.
This so called “Banned Books” is extremely misleading and a stretch of the truth. No one is banning any books. In all the states, you can still go to any bookstore and purchase them. You can go to any public library and read/borrow them. You can order them online and have them shipped to your house. The use of the words “Banned Books” is nothing more than to get attention and push the left’s (LGBTQ+ agenda).
In reality, what is happening is some K-6 grade schools, in mostly conservative republican states, are being selective in what book are allowed in the libraries of their schools. This is nothing new and is completely legal and allowable. The faculty, administration, PTA, and parents are requesting that some books be removed or not allowed until the students are older.
I fully agree with the removal of most of the books that have been removed from these schools. Most of these books being removed are LGBTQ+ books that try to encourage kids to pick/chose their own gender or push the LGBTQ+ mindset on children. Go and actually look at some of the books these school districts are removing. You’d wouldn’t want your young children reading them. The worst example was a book that went into great detail visualizing a gay sexual encounter between a young teen and an older adult.
Off topic but, In my opinion LGBTQ+ should be considered a religion so the “separation of church and state” would apply. The whole debate would be over. It would then be the parents responsibility to educate their children on the subject if they wanted.
Agreed fully. These books are still available for free at public libraries. That is not even close to “banning” them.
Great comment. Thank you.