Young adults are finding it harder to borrow books reflective of their lived experiences in their schools and public libraries. It isn’t because these stories don’t exist — they do — but because they’ve been challenged and removed, restricted, or were never purchased at all.
This is especially true in parts of the country where state legislatures have enacted laws criminalizing what educators can and can’t say about politically, religiously, or morally divisive topics, as well as regions where public services are underfunded and access to books is already scarce.
But in recent years, a handful of urban library systems have stepped up to offer readers who are at least 13 years old a chance to read the books that might be unavailable in their home areas.
Since 2022, thousands of eligible young adults have registered for a little-known program called Books Unbanned, which Brooklyn Public Library in New York created that year to counter efforts to restrict access to certain books.
Books Unbanned’s popularity among young readers — more than 8,000 have signed up — comes amid record-breaking book censorship efforts, according to data compiled by the American Library Association. The ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom has tracked a more-than-400-percent increase in the number of reported book challenges in the U.S. between 2020 and 2024. The challenges reported to the ALA in 2024 alone targeted 2,452 titles.
The Supreme Court’s recent ruling to allow parents to pull their children out of classroom discussions around books covering LGBTQ+ and other themes that may conflict with their religious beliefs could embolden efforts to restrict more titles.
Brooklyn’s program gives readers between 13 and 21 anywhere in the country the ability to opt in. As it turns out, its digital “banned book” library cards are a bit of a misnomer because they also provide access to materials unaffected by bans.
It‘s our entire book collection. Half a million items. You can read whatever you want.
— Amy Mikel,
Brooklyn Public Library
“It’s our entire book collection,” said Amy Mikel, director of customer experience and librarian at Brooklyn Public Library. “Half a million items. You can read whatever you want” that’s in a digital format.
The Brooklyn library’s records show Books Unbanned cardholders are collectively borrowing more than 100,000 unique titles a year, many of which have nothing to do with the most frequently challenged subjects for youth, such as race, sex, gender, or lived experiences that are decidedly difficult or hard to read.
“Obviously there are people who write to us and say, ‘thank you so much — now I can access the books that have been taken away from me,’” said Mikel. “But the fact is that these young people are accessing books that are not controversial at all.”
Other libraries have since launched their own programs, though not every library can afford to provide the level of access Brooklyn’s program does.
Private Funding
Each program is based on different parameters that are largely determined by the level of private funding libraries receive and the subsequent licensing agreements they’re able to secure.
Because most libraries with foundations are based in major cities, so far all of the programs come from urban libraries receiving robust support from their respective foundations, which raise money in addition to the funding they’ve historically received from the federal government to cover operational costs.
Many public libraries have “Friends of the Library” groups that raise money and advocate for their libraries by organizing community events such as used-book sales. Some foundations for larger library systems attract large philanthropic gifts that can pay for specific licenses negotiated with publishers. These negotiations often determine what type of digital book access libraries can afford to provide patrons.
The breadth of access differs among libraries. While Seattle Public Library’s Books Unbanned e-card gives young adults up to age 26 access to its entire OverDrive collection and is open to readers throughout the U.S., the LA County Library Books Unbanned program is limited to teens 13 to 18, and is available only to residents of California.
Boston Public Library and San Diego Public Library took a more refined approach to their Books Unbanned programs. Both offer access to young adults who register throughout the U.S., but their collections are limited to frequently challenged or banned titles.
Each of the participating libraries encourage young adults to apply for as many banned book e-cards as they’re eligible for to make use of as many collections as possible.
Empty Shelves
What Brooklyn Public Library did wasn’t novel in terms of what librarians routinely do. But it was innovative in the sense that it re-envisioned big ideas — like what is a service area in the post-digital age. Books Unbanned responded to a perceived threat to young adults’ First Amendment rights to receive information. The perceived threat has escalated.
Since the program launched, a patchwork of legislation across several states criminalizes teachers to varying degrees for what they say about sexual orientation, gender identity or racial ideology in an educational context. Moms for Liberty targeted young adult books with LGBTQ+ and BIPOC characters. The group’s website cites passages about sexual content from young adult books out of context and then rates them according to its own proprietary system. This website equipped adults with the quotes they needed to challenge books on school library shelves, leading to record bans nearly every year since 2021.
In rural areas, the problem is less likely to be book challenges but instead chronic underfunding of library services.
“This program wouldn’t need to exist if everybody just had access to a robust digital collection where they live,” said Mikel at Brooklyn Public Library.
Participating libraries invite cardholders to share their experiences with book censorship when they sign up or renew a banned book card. Last year, Brooklyn Public Library and Seattle Public Library issued a report documenting how teenagers and young adults are encountering censorship in their communities.
Teens reported witnessing the obvious shrinking of collections, with gaps on shelves where certain books used to be. They also said that if they do have access to a library, that its collection was dated or limited. And some reported intentional self-censorship: Jennifer Jenkins, deputy director of customer experience with the San Diego Public Library, heard from several young adults who said they could check out a frequently challenged book from their local library, but they chose not to in order to protect their teachers and librarians from retaliation.
Cardholders also cite state-specific legislation that alters what their teachers can teach and their libraries can shelve, and librarians who draw unwanted attention to the age-appropriateness of the titles they check out. This aligns with other restrictive policies some libraries have introduced, including age limitations, parental permissions, content warning labels, and removing tags from online catalogs, which makes certain books harder to find in the system.
Mikel in Brooklyn says restrictions can be hard to measure but can significantly impact a young adult’s ability to access information.
“When people say things like, ‘It’s not a book ban, we just removed it from the school library,’” Mikel said. “In some cases, removing that book from that one place of access is effectively erasing the book altogether from that young person’s life.”
Tacit censorship resulting from restrictive lending policies is harder for researchers to track.
“Most librarians work really hard to give their students what they need, but there are certainly a group of librarians who just aren’t comfortable with these trends of LGBTQ+ and BIPOC literature,” said Tasslyn Magnussun, an independent consultant for PEN America and other groups tracking the rise of book censorship. “So there’s what was purchased and what wasn’t purchased: Self-censorship before the rise of big censorship.”
Limits of Privacy
The types of censorship librarians are experiencing is also true of teachers. A 2024 RAND Corporation report found that while roughly half of K-12 public school teachers face some sort of state or district policies that limit what they can say about political and social issues, some teachers are still more likely to avoid certain topics even with supportive administrators and parents. Jenkins says digital cardholder comments give library workers in urban systems more insight into how the cards are affecting librarians outside major metropolitan areas.
There‘s a chilling effect happening, self-censorship … It‘s inadvertently causing people to make more conservative choices just by default.
— Jennifer Jenkins,
San Diego Public Library
“There is a chilling effect happening, self-censorship, where it’s affecting the decision-making ability of educated, trained, [and] skilled librarians and educators, in terms of selecting materials that are age-appropriate and appropriate for various readers,” Jenkins said. “It’s inadvertently causing people to make more conservative choices just by default.”
Part of the appeal for Books Unbanned e-card holders is some semblance of a private reading life. And while the librarians involved in the program through their institutions are committed to connecting readers with the titles they want to read, access doesn’t necessarily come easily to everyone because it’s not safe to assume every young adult has a device with e-reader capabilities, reliable internet access or working headphones. Or privacy, for that matter.
In the case of digital books, librarians work closely with vendors to secure licenses to circulate ebook and audiobook copies of titles. These professional partnerships are sometimes fraught. Part of that has to do with librarians having to relinquish control over infrastructure and access to the vendors’ applications, which take users from the library’s website to platforms like Libby. This is different from how physical book vendors work with libraries. Once books are ordered from a distributor, they belong to the library. Libraries don’t have to keep paying for digital borrowers. The digital rules don’t apply.
One criticism librarians have of vendor software is that it’s designed to support the licensing model for publishers but not the end-users facing challenges to their First Amendment rights. Vendors are facing pressure to comply with legislation in states where the right to receive information through school curriculums and library collections is vulnerable.
Take, for instance, Destiny, a widely used book checkout system in school libraries across the country. In 2022, its parent company announced and quickly walked back that it was considering a parental control module in its Destiny software to address requests to opt out of LGBTQ+ tagged books. But the company canceled the feature after librarians pointed out how it could be abused by releasing their library checkout history and placing borrowing restrictions on accounts — in violation of both the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights and student privacy rights under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).
Melissa Andrews, Boston Public Library’s chief of collection management, says it’s important for libraries to retain the ability to opt out of contractual clauses. Without it, digital contracts could result in a book being removed from circulation for everyone, including young adults living in areas without book bans.
“Once it’s coded into that software, it makes it easier for other libraries to do that without the law in place,” said Andrews. “And it also doesn’t necessarily go away if our culture changes in three to four years.”
InterLibrary Loan Threatened
In certain parts of the country, searching for the nearest copy of a frequently banned, challenged, or restricted book through the Worldcat catalog might show one that is 200 miles away, creating an ersatz banned-book desert akin to a news desert.
What’s more, libraries are vulnerable to the whims of political spending. The Trump Administration’s budget, if passed, is expected to result in the elimination of InterLibrary Loan for most institutions, unless they have the money in their budgets to opt in.
“The amount [for] my library to buy into the InterLibrary Loan system, if it’s not [federally] funded, is like the size of our entire budget,” Magnussun said. “There’s just no way our tiny little one-room library would be able to participate. So then those kids are definitely not getting those books.”
If InterLibrary Loan became too expensive for most libraries, it would put more pressure on the resources belonging to libraries participating in Books Unbanned. Such an outcome raises important questions about young readers in rural America accessing digital books from just a handful of well-resourced urban libraries hundreds of miles away. But Magnussun says the cost of not making the books accessible for queer and Brown youth, especially, is worse.
“There’s a question of a balance between, what’s the ideal situation — certainly not having [only] three libraries in the country fund the only LGBTQ+ literature that will be available to young people, but that’s where we are at this moment in time,” said Magnussun of PEN. “What I don’t want to see people doing, especially the library organizations, is [saying], ‘Oh, problem solved. We’re going to have Brooklyn Public Library or San Diego carry the rest of the country.’
“Because,” Magnussun adds, “that’s not right.”
Mikel said Brooklyn and other participating libraries are looking for new participant libraries. She remains confident in the program’s private funding even amid interference from groups and lawmakers in favor of bans. But despite the interest in Books Unbanned, most knowledge workers agree that it’s far from ideal. The program should be regarded as a stop-gap while communities wrestle with the tougher question of censorship.
“We’re proud of this initiative — it’s really important, but this is not the solution to anything,” said Andrews at Boston Public Library. Yet for the young readers putting their banned book e-library cards to use, “[H]opefully it helps right now.”