The Business of Children’s Books in This New Era of Book Banning
As the publishing industry reels from a spate of recent bans—the majority of which affect kids—schools and libraries are providing some hope.
Illustration: Saehan Parc for Bloomberg Businessweek.
A new record was set in the US last year, but no one seems eager to brag about it: Book bans hit a high, with more than 2,500 in American schools and libraries between June 2021 and June 2022—almost double the number of the previous year. Bans targeting specific books date to colonial times, but the recent widespread outcry against a wide range of titles and topics echoes McCarthy-era challenges. Notably, of the 1,648 books affected in the most recent spate of bans noted above, 89% were intended for children.
Veteran publisher Arthur Levine, formerly the head of an imprint at Scholastic Corp., has vivid memories of attempts to ban children’s books, such as J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. “In my memory [those] books were so big that they would not be contained, and the efforts to ban them were pretty small and disorganized,” he says. “These more recent bans are more impactful because they’re governmental. They’re impinging on our children’s ability to understand their world.”