Free banned Books: Dangerous Downloads

This week marks the 30th anniversary of Banned Books Week, a censorship-awareness campaign backed by “the entire book community –- librarians, booksellers, publishers, journalists, teachers, and readers of all types,” according to the American Library Association

Moneytalksnews have compiled a useful list and links to download 20 banned classics including Huckleberry Finn and Call of the Wild. Find the list HERE

Banned Bee Gees

Hot on the heels of Banned Books Week, comes a new Radio Seven season presenting plays based on and readings from banned books. Comedian, broadcaster and real life barrister Clive Anderson (a man who famously had the Bee Gees walk off his show) presents the series - it all kicks off on Radio Seven tomorrow with a dramatisation of Lady Chatterley's Lover and then continues with Madame Bovery. Other dramas and readings in the season include Animal Farm, A Clockwork Orange and Fahrenheit 451.

Find details on the Radio 7 homepage HERE

Below. just for fun,  is the famous interview where Le Tossers, sorry the Bee Gees walked off the chat show.

Some Banned Books

Banned in some British libraries because of homosexual subtext

To illustrate the often idiotic reasons for banning books here are a few banned books.

"James" was banned for obscenity and violence, while "The Witches" was banned for sexism and devaluing the life of a child.

Banned because of the word, "nigger", which whilst not acceptable today was of its period.

The most absurd of all - Both the Merriam Webster and the American Heritage Dictionaries have been banned in various schools. The Merriam Webster was banned in a California elementary school in January 2010 for its definition of oral sex. "It's just not age appropriate," a district representative said.

ARCHIVE BOOK BIZ NEWS

THE DIGITAL TAKEOVER:Will digital books catch fire this holiday? According to an online survey, 1 in 5 shoppers said they planned to buy an electronic book reader such as a Sony Reader or Amazon Kindle this year. When asked what they would like to get as a gift this year, about 1 in 10 cited a digital book reader. Portable music players, once the hot holiday ticket, got just 3.4% of the vote, while game consoles came in at 6%. Likely buyers tend to be men, under 35 years old, living in the Northeast where more people use public transportation, and with an average annual household income of more than $100,000, according to the survey of 771 respondents.

Of those who said they planned to spring for an electronic book reader, 62% said they would buy Amazon's Kindle 2 or Kindle DX, while 32% favored the Sony Reader. Although Amazon and Sony dominate the business today, more devices are scheduled to hit the U.S. market within the next year, including the $399 IREX expected later this winter and Plastic Logic due out in 2010.

The wonderfully scatty Sarah Palin: Only announced a few months ago but it has now been confirmed that Sarah Palin's autobiography will be in stores by Christmas.

EVEN THE US ARE FOLLOWING THE UK WITH THIS NONSENSE: For a country that venerates its First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech, the United States tries to ban books with alarming frequency.

Stick a pin in each place where there's been a challenge to a school or library book, and you'll have a map of the United States that looks like a hedgehog in need of a haircut.

This year already, challenges have been reported from Montana to Indiana to Texas, in high schools and libraries, and from classics like Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, to newer books like Brent Hartinger's The Geography Club and Chris Crutcher's Chinese Handcuffs.

This February in West Bend, Wisconsin, a local couple filed a petition calling for the Library Advisory Board to remove or label several Young Adult titles, including Francesca Lia Block's Baby Be Bop and Stephen Chobsky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower, because they felt that all the books in the young-adult section that dealt with homosexuality were "gay-affirming." The couple also requested that the library build a collection of books by "ex-gays" in order to achieve an ideological balance.

GOOGLE BOOK SETTLEMENT DEAD IN THE WATER: The Settlement, however, has received an exceptional amount of objections from a variety of sources, including countries, states, nonprofit organizations, and prominent authors and law professors. Indeed, objections to the settlement are too numerous to discuss fully here, but include concerns regarding orphan works, potential antitrust violation, and privacy concerns. This has resulted in the parties renegotiating many aspects of the agreement. Just yesterday, Judge Chin of the Southern District of New York, granted a motion to delay an October 7 hearing on the settlement given the fact that the parties are renegotiating the agreement. In light of all this, it remains to be seen to what extent the settlement can survive in any form…

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joan-e-bertin/banned-books-week-still-n_b_302248.html

BANNED BOOK WEEK IS HERE

If you or your children or grandchildren have read any of the books pictured, you have read a banned book. Your mid has been corrupted, or at least is has according to the political correct brigade.

Today begins National Banned

Book Week. It is a celebration of going into a library and picking up books off the shelves and reading them. Books that bland uninteresting middle class wankers think are too much for your sensibilities.

These people would rather you and other people in the world didn’t have the opportunity to read some of these books.

These people who seek to ban books from libraries are the PC brigade. They usually challenge books or ask the library to ban them with the best intentions in mind: to protect others, especially children, from difficult ideas and information. I'd much rather they piss off and protect us from their puerile nonsense. The world has gone PC crazy - recently I was served Spotted Richard because a European Directive says we can't call it, "spotted dick anymore" -The effort to remove books from libraries — public and school libraries — is wrong.

No person or group of people who have personal problems with a set of ideas should tell other people what they can or cannot read. Or eat or watch or anything else these dangerous lunatics who have seized control of political power feel is unsuitable.

As the linguist Noam Chomsky has said, “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”

CENSORSHIP REARS ITS UGLY HEAD

Banned Books week is an important initiative that readers everywhere should support. Click on the button on the website to find out more.