Many book bans in the US could be judging titles mainly by their covers

Over the past decade, a growing movement to restrict access to books in public schools and libraries has spread across the country. Every year, there are hundreds of attempts to challenge or ban books, targeting thousands of titles.

According to the nonprofit free speech advocacy group PEN America, there have been nearly 16,000 book bans in US public schools and libraries since 2021, a number not seen since the 1950s under McCarthyism. The actual number of bans likely is much higher, since not every book ban gets officially reported.

During the 2020s, book banning has become a viral phenomenon. Small, conservative nonprofits such as Moms for Liberty, founded in 2021, have developed and expanded their advocacy for book bans at the local, state and national levels. These groups position themselves as defenders of parental rights against obscenity in education, while interpreting “obscenity” broadly enough to include so-called “woke” ideologies.

And while not all efforts to ban books are successful, these groups have been extremely effective. For example, from July 2021 to June 2022 there were 2,532 instances of books being banned across 32 states, affecting 1,648 different books, according to the “Banned in the USA” report by PEN America.

In early 2023, we were part of a team that researched book bans enacted over the course of the 2021-2022 school year. We found that...

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