By Annie Goodykoontz
There were 10,000 instances of book bans at public schools in the 2023-24 school year, according to PEN America. In 2024, 5,813 titles were challenged in public libraries and schools nationwide, says the American Library Assn.
“So many books for young people are being taken off the shelf,” said Fritzi Bodenheimer, spokesperson for the Brooklyn Public Library in New York. “If you’re a young person, you know, you’re 14 or 15 years old and you’re just discovering yourself and maybe you think that you might be a member of the LGBTQ community and all those books are taken off the shelf. What message does that send to you? That you’re a bad person? That you’re dangerous?”
To combat book censorship, some Southern California public libraries, including Los Angeles, Long Beach and San Diego, are joining libraries nationwide to provide access to online library cards. Children as young as 13 can get a free e-card to access the libraries’ catalog of e-books and audiobooks, without parental permission and without any challenges they may face to get a book in their local library.
Long Beach is the latest public library to join this effort, a project known as Books Unbanned that was started by the Brooklyn Public Library. The project’s website calls it a response to “support the freedom to read.” […]
Cathy De Leon, the director of the department of library, arts and culture at Long Beach Public Library, said plans to join Books Unbanned began around late 2024. The Long Beach Public Library Foundation, a nonprofit charity that supports the library financially, began communicating with the Brooklyn Public Library about the project and found the partnership to be a “really good fit, and something we really believed in,” she said. The Long Beach City Council approved the partnership on July 22.
