According to “Banned in the USA,” a report issued by the writers’ organization PEN America in April, nearly 1,600 individual books were banned in 26 states between July 1, 2021 and March 31, 2022. Read more
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In our brave new world of online surveillance and 280 character missives, of endless scrolling and shortening attention spans, a printed book can’t be traced like your virtual activity can — protecting our cognitive liberty and making it more valuable than ever. Books still are, as Stephen King (another proud writer of many a banned book) called them, “our most uniquely portable magic.” They are dangerous tools of destruction indeed — because the best ones break down the barriers that separate you and me. In other words, they humanize us. Read more
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Markus Dohle, the chief executive of Penguin Random House, said the effort “ties into the future of our democracy.” Read more
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Peter B. Kaufman’s rigorous and eloquent new book, The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge, traces the history of this dream of open access to knowledge. It “begins with torture and ends with a vision of another violent civil war. There’s some gun violence, some beheadings, tanks rolling over people, something for everyone.” A recurring problem is the concentration of power. “Archive,” as Kaufman points out, derives from “rule” or “govern,” in the “archon,” the seat of power. Governance and trading require knowledge, so in that sense all economies have been information economies, with all the associated pitfalls. Thus, release of closely guarded information into the public commons is a source of mortal danger to those in power. Read more
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