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...

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.

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... )

> 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.

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.

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

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

> 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

Thank you for this!

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

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.

> 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.