[focusgroup0]

Well done! What a cool project and impressive write up. As KYC and Age Verification laws continue to gain steam, efforts like this will safeguard humanity's rights to freedom of speech and association.

What follows is not a critique of the author, for he or she is likely immersed in the same "banned books" media psyop as other Western News Consoomers.

As of this reply, the "banned" books in question [0] are:

Jack_London_-_Call_of_the_Wild.epub

Mark_Twain_-_Adventures_of_Huckleberry_Finn.epub

Mark_Twain_-_The_Adventures_of_Tom_Sawyer.epub

Women_in_Love_-_D_H_Lawrence.epub

These books are all available on Amazon for under $10. Further, they are often assigned reading in high school or university literature classes.

A thought experiment by comparison: what if the collection consisted of the following?

- The Camp of the Saints

- Culture of Critique

- The Turner Diaries

Until a recent reprint of the first title (which thanks to The Streisand Effect was one of the top sellers on Amazon), these were all almost impossible to find and / or prohibitively expensive. Note that I don't necessarily agree with the subject matter of these titles, just pointing out collective blindspots so we the people can avoid actual Bans in the not too distant future.

0: https://codeberg.org/rickoooooo/BannedBookLibrary/src/branch...

[rickoooooo]

I chose books that were out of copyright, available from project Gutenberg, and had been banned or challenged in the USA at some point in the past to use as examples. There weren't many options. It's designed so the user can include whatever books are important to them wherever they may live. They may live somewhere more oppressive where banned books are a common occurrence. I have no idea. It wouldn't be wise to include copyrighted works in a public repository where I live.

[echelon]

> The idea is that if you drop this somewhere in public, you can try to match whatever color was there before so it is less noticeable that anything changed.

I *love* this concept so much.

Even though the books are a neat hook, these wifi networks could contain anything.

Grassroots political advocacy, local info for off-the-grid historical sites, location specific micro-social media (comments, message boards, etc.), waymarkers, geocaching, hidden music / art / games in obscure places, ARGs like an interactive capture the flag or something even more inventive and fun, ...

God, this is just so freaking cool and is begging for a thousand different ideas to run on top of it.

Good job! One of the best things I've seen all year.

[thaumasiotes]

> It wouldn't be wise to include copyrighted works in a public repository where I live.

If you have a problem with storing illegal books in your "banned book library", you may be working on the wrong project.

[afavour]

As it stands it is a great example for others to learn from. If you include copyrighted books it’ll get pulled from GitHub and no one will learn from it.

[sgentle]

Your thought experiment asks: what if the banned book library contained out-of-print white supremacist books instead of historically banned books?

The answer should be obvious: it would be a white supremacist library.

Given that the present administration includes fans of those books, their banning seems unlikely. Perhaps a refresher on the kinds of books that are presently under threat is in order? https://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10

(You can find contemporary Huck Finn censorship attempts in their database here, by the way: https://airtable.com/appZthgrTU9u1Bf5d/shr4J8Mgiua2CV2Ig?mWW... )

[pooploop64]

Reminds me of the "banned book" table every book store has now. The place where so called banned books are given the most prominent display in the whole store with discounts if you buy a novelty pencil or something alongside it.

I thought we would all be over this after the dr seuss thing.

[evil-olive]

> likely immersed in the same "banned books" media psyop as other Western News Consoomers

all 4 of the books that are checked-in to that repo are old enough that they're in the public domain. I looked at Call of the Wild and it has a title page saying it came from Project Gutenberg, I assume the other 3 likely did too.

rather than jumping to conclusions about the author being influenced by a "psyop" I think there's a much simpler and more boring explanation - they didn't want to check copyrighted ebooks into a publicly-accessible Codeberg repo.

[rickoooooo]

I chose these books as examples precisely because they are out of copyright and available on project Gutenberg. They also had been banned or challenged on the USA in the past. Project Gutenberg has a list of "banned books" on their own website and these are all included.

[frollogaston]

They appear to all be public domain. Even if they weren't, grandparent could've just called out that these are not really banned books instead of being pretentious with the "psyop" thing.

[dindunuf]

but it is a psyop. there are no banned books in America.

every time some random school in bumfuck Alabama removes some LGBT/CRT/DEI/ESG/whatever pamphlet no one was ever going to actually read from its library, every dailybeast/salon/huffingtonpost/motherjones/etc equate that incident to Nazi book burnings. if you want, I can don a hazmat, venture to r/politics, and exhume a dozen threads about such incidents where the target audience of those articles expresses their anger and disappointment over hundreds of near identical comments.

[frollogaston]

Whether or not a psyop exists, it's presumptuous to say the author has fallen victim of it. Also suggests you're immune or something.

Also, the books on the bulb include Huckleberry Finn, which was removed from required reading in some Democrat-governed California cities because it uses racial slurs.

[hydrogen7800]

When should it be reported, then?

[dindunuf]

when it's banned by the federal government.

[danorama]

Don’t “necessarily agree” with the Turner Diaries? Why the mystery? Should we guess?

[jeffgreco]

It won't surprise most people here that this guy's past comments have a real weird focus on race!

[JoshTriplett]

> what if the collection consisted of the following?

As the only books in it? Then it'd be best marketed as the "white supremacist conspiracy theorist starter kit". Throw in Mein Kampf while you're at it.

Just because a book is controversial doesn't make it good. No books should be banned, ever. But some books don't need promoting in a curated collection, either. They're useful for people doing literature research and understanding certain subcultures, but unlike the first list, they're not something useful and interesting to promote to a mass market, which makes them not good choices for a project like this.

Books are comparatively tiny, as data goes. If you have the space for a comprehensive list of every book in the public domain, by all means include those in it. But if you're making a curated list of a handful of books, and it's that list? That's certainly a choice.

See also this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48549512

[wincy]

I started reading the Camp of the Saints precisely because people said I shouldn’t. It was a bad book, I couldn’t read more than a few chapters. But I think adults should be able to read whatever they want.

[sam1r]

Thank you for this!

It's been a while since I used the github gist 'download zip' functionality. Quite handy.

[p-e-w]

Thank you for pointing this out. That list of “banned books” (that were unbanned long ago, and are now considered great literature) indeed seems more like virtue signaling.

There are equivalent books in our own time, and using those instead would make the project feel more like an actual defense of Free Speech and less like a quip of “goodness gracious, people were prudes in the 1920s”, which everyone already agrees with.

[rickoooooo]

These are just examples I could legally include in a public github repository to demonstrate the functionality. The alternative would be to include copyrighted works or nothing. The user is free to include any books that are important to them.

[hoppyhoppy2]

As has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, "books in our own time" tend to still be under copyright and might not survive long in a public code repository.

[p-e-w]

There is at least one “banned” book, written by a former dictator, whose copyright expired in 2015, 70 years after his death in 1945.

But that’s a good ban of course, because Freedom of Speech only matters when it concerns speech I agree with.

[evil-olive]

> But that’s a good ban of course, because Freedom of Speech only matters when it concerns speech I agree with.

putting hypothetical words in other peoples' mouths like this seems like it must be a pretty exhausting way to try to make a point.

quoting from the article:

> I think the idea hosting banned books specifically came to me after having read Ben Brown's short story Library. It's been a while since I read it, but if I recall there are characters in the story who maintain a "library" which acts as a digital archive of creative works, owners manuals, 3d models, etc. Things that others might find useful or interesting that you wouldn't want to lose should they be somehow wiped from the Internet.

the purpose of a project like this seems to be not just "here's some banned books" but rather "here's some banned books that I think are worth sharing / reading". if you think Mein Kampf belongs on that list, just say so directly.

but also the premise of your comment is wrong, because Mein Kampf is not banned at all: https://www.amazon.com/Mein-Kampf-Adolf-Hitler-ebook/dp/B002...

[wiml]

Is Mein Kampf banned? It's currently in print and available from your friendly bookseller, in multiple editions spanning a couple translations and the original German. Of the two public library systems that cover my area, one has it (12 holds on 4 copies) and the other doesn't but does have other books by Hitler. I expect it's assigned reading in poli-sci classes.

[msla]

> Note that I don't necessarily agree with the subject matter of these titles

Y'know, there's really only one reason to be coy about whether you agree with Neo-Nazi propaganda.