The Banned Book Club is an e-reader app that can get you over the firewall.
To get from one side of the U.S. to the other is to criss-cross a veritable snakes and ladders of state and county-level legislation and policy. If you’re after a particular title by Toni Morrison or Margaret Atwood, you might find that it’s available in Georgia, and effectively banned next door in Florida. A new initiative from the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), launched in concert with the Palace Project, hopes to toss a ladder to people living in places where access is restricted.
The Banned Book Club is a free e-reader app that uses GPS-enabled geotargeting to determine which books are not available in a given area, and upload them to a library. To transcend petty local politics, simply download The Palace app, then select “Banned Books Club” as your “local library.” You will then be able to access all the goodies that someone else has “challenged.”
Executive Director of the DPLA, John Bracken, said in a statement that “book bans are one of the greatest threats to our freedom.” Thus, your local library doing what it can to remedy your rights.
They can’t wrap every state in tin foil, can they!
The project was announced on July 20th, and is doing its work as I type.
