Becoming an Audiobook Reader

Editor’s note: We welcome a guest blog post from Sarah Clinton-McCausland, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Open Education Librarian at the University of Maryland.

I never thought I’d lose my leisure reading habit. Leisure reading, pleasure reading, or “free voluntary reading” is “reading because you want to… [P]utting down a book you don’t like and choosing another one instead” (Krashen, 2004, p. x). Growing up, it was also my favorite activity in the world.

For people who like to read, reading is fun—more specifically, it is cognitively complex, immersive, energizing, embodied, and grounding. It’s a kind of play that takes place within a relatively safe container, balancing flow and emotional regulation, escape and connection, uncertainty and exploration. Allowed to read whatever I wanted throughout my childhood and adolescence, I checked out stacks of books from the public library and pulled intriguing, probably-age-inappropriate titles off my parents’ shelves. Each new book set me down in a world of unfamiliar people and occurrences, generating a hungry curiosity that propelled me forward. Reading allowed me to contextualize my own experiences and learn more about my likes and dislikes, deeply shaping my sense of self. I always preferred “visual reading”—print paper books, and later, the occasional eBook—but when it came to genre, I craved variety.

Then I started college—a time of personal growth and intellectual demand. I learned how to read and analyze theoretical texts purposively for a grade, but this process—combined with a newly expanded social life—gradually shifted me away from leisure reading. In the years after graduation, I would come home drained from my office jobs and crash in front of the Netflix subscription I could finally afford. I got through a handful of visual books per year, but the process had become a slog. No matter the book, my attention would drift, nagged by an endless to-do list of chores and obligations. Discouraged, I’d return books to the library half-finished. I had quietly lost my reading habit, but I didn’t fully understand why.

A few years later, midway through my MLIS, I sought answers through a class project. I conducted qualitative research with twelve Millennials who identified as lapsed avid leisure readers. Many of them had grown up in middle-class U.S. households and attended college, but all had developed more complicated relationships to their leisure time in adulthood, which impacted their media habits. Participants reported that “getting into” a book was the biggest barrier to regaining a habit, but it helped to choose reading material that was purely for fun. Others met their need for narrative story by listening to podcasts and audiobooks or reading more long-form articles on their phones, all of which slotted more easily into the shorter pockets of transitional, unstructured time available throughout the day.

Free voluntary reading can be a powerful expression of what bell hooks (1994) and Paulo Freire (1970) term “the practice of freedom.” Once we’ve learned how to read, we can engage in the serendipity that reading engenders for the rest of our lives, reminding ourselves over and over that we are malleable and can dream beyond our current contexts. But there are many dominant cultural forces in the U.S. which discourage exactly this kind of visionary play. We know the form this takes in 2026: literal book bans; the monetization of our attention; rising living costs; the demand that we continuously optimize our time and energy toward paid work and quantifiable self-improvement. And of course we also face the extraction of our labor and creativity via generative AI, while we’re simultaneously told that genAI will render that same labor and creativity obsolete. After college, my study participants and I were plunged more deeply into the demands of a semi-post-recession labor market, and things have only gotten weirder since then. Everyone I encounter is stressed and overscheduled at best. In times like these, reading can be an especially powerful balm—a ladder in our survival toolkits. But it can also be harder to read when so much is happening.

My study participants’ stories echoed my own, but while they made me feel less alone, they still weren’t enough to kickstart me back into reading. Paradoxically, because I’d started to consider reading something that was “good for me” and morally superior to other leisure activities, it had morphed into another means of optimization. I had a narrow vision of “ideal” leisure reading as a disciplined, meditative, phone-free hour with a print book each night before bed. So I felt ashamed when reality fell short of my expectations: Why can’t I read anymore?? How come all I do is watch TV? It’s so embarrassing that I’m a librarian who doesn’t read! It took me a long time to understand that my perfectionism around my reading practices erased both my hunger to read habitually and the potential benefits.

Unlike many of my study participants, though, I didn’t consider audiobooks a suitable alternative. The same white supremacist culture which prizes optimization tends to value written over oral language, and steeped in that culture, I’d come to believe that listening to audiobooks wasn’t quite “real” reading—and also that I just wasn’t an audiobook person. The deeper truth: I was scared I wasn’t actually capable of listening to audiobooks. My education and career have always rewarded my visual reading skills. Having both my sight and hearing (and a love for music and podcasts) made it easier to spend years ignoring how much I struggled to follow linear narratives in audio. My brain tends to slip around and chase other thoughts without printed text or images to ground it.

Still, it was obvious that audiobooks had the huge advantage of letting me do other things while reading. In theory, I could visually read much faster than I could listen to someone else reading, but I slowly came to acknowledge that it might be worth trying to read in my nonpreferred modality if the alternative was not really reading at all. Halfway through 2023, I checked out my first audiobook: a literary mystery-thriller by a favorite author I’d only read in print before. I raced through it in a few days and immediately borrowed another one.

I quickly confirmed that audiobooks’ affordances allowed them to fit into the interstitial, transitional times in my schedule, making chores more tolerable while letting me get into a book more easily. I started delving into books that had sat on my list for years, rediscovering the joy of reading only what I wanted to and abandoning anything that felt like just a “should.” I slowly became more comfortable with the affordances of audiobooks, and they’re now the first format I reach for when leisure reading. In other words, I think I’ve developed “audiobook literacy.”

I am still simply not as adept with aural media as visual, though, and probably never will be. In the past few years, I’ve gently observed my experiences, trying different strategies to accommodate and scaffold my audio reading needs. Now, for most books, I’ll try to obtain the print or eBook version at the same time so I can refer back to it periodically. (Sometimes a text-only book will convey additional layers of meaning through font and text formatting, making the book “sound” different when read visually. If I can’t get the print version of a given book, however, I have to just accept that it’s OK to get a different variation of the experience!) For literature with more characters or complex plots, I’ll also enhance my comprehension by taking notes and making family trees, timelines, or other diagrams by hand. (I love a sweeping multigenerational family saga—and a diagram!) I finally got through Wuthering Heights in audio this year by referring to the Project Gutenberg eBook and creating a chaotic but extremely helpful family tree based on the Wikipedia entry.

The more audiobooks I’ve read, the more I’ve finally embraced the reality that listening to audiobooks is reading. Recent research has started confirming what audiobookworms have known all along: a 2019 study, for instance, found that “the semantic representations evoked by listening versus reading are almost identical” (Deniz et al., p. 7722). Our brains paint similar pictures regardless of modality.

That said, I still find that print and audio produce different reading experiences, and releasing my reading perfectionism has been a whole accommodation strategy in itself! I have a better time when I approach an audiobook knowing the experience won’t be exactly the same, and not expecting myself to “succeed” in audio the same way I can in print. I’ve developed more patience for my need to replay the same passages multiple times after spacing out, more tolerance for the vocal dissonance between my own internal narrator and the audiobook’s. I’ve learned I actually prefer some books in audio, especially thrillers, memoirs, and author-read titles. I enjoy giving my eyes a break and practicing my close listening skills. Sometimes I even remember audiobooks better than their visual counterparts, maybe because I have to work harder for them.

I’ve also learned that print and audio are fundamentally complementary. When I engage with a book in one format, I’m more likely to engage with the other—maybe even switching off depending on my mood. Learning to be curious and flexible about format—not just genre—has allowed me to take advantage of the affordances of audio, making reading a joyful and rewarding experience again.

Developing audiobook literacy has unexpectedly impacted my work as a subject liaison librarian in various ways, too. I’ve come to see leisure reading practices as a powerful way to develop transferable information literacy skills. They can teach us more about information contexts and affordances; show us new ways to navigate our own and others’ access needs; and help us reenvision inequitable systems. In reference and instruction interactions, I’ve started demonstrating how to access sources in different formats by default (e.g., “this database also lets you listen to journal articles in audio”), and I highlight library accessibility services in resource lists. My own experiences remind me that media format preferences are deeply individual, and disability status and access needs are complex and constantly shifting. I can’t ever assume where someone else locates themselves along those spectrums, especially because they may have very good reasons for not telling me or the institution.

I’ve also deepened my commitment to promoting play and leisure for their own sake. I suggest students pursue the projects that most spark their curiosity and interest, but I also encourage them to carve out leisure time outside of school and work whenever possible. As an icebreaker, I sometimes ask students to share any piece of leisure media they’ve enjoyed recently, emphasizing the validity of all formats. I’ll also disclose my own preferences and access challenges when appropriate. This can segue into conversations about accessibility, platformization, and the pros and cons of different formats in context—all applicable to scholarship, too.

My own information literacy skills (and institutional affiliation) also make it easier to access leisure reading materials. I usually get audiobooks and eBooks from my public library via Libby, but I occasionally buy them from Libro.fm or check LibriVox for public domain titles. I borrow print books from my workplace (including via interlibrary loan) or the public library, access public domain titles via Project Gutenberg, and sometimes purchase from Thriftbooks.com or Bookshop.org. I want to support students in developing a similar sense of information abundance and more pathways for meeting their leisure needs even after graduation, so in orientations, I talk about how public and academic libraries complement each other, and I explicitly promote our local public libraries as major sources for leisure reading and learning. Students aren’t always aware that they can get a public library card for free and access more “fun” books in print, audio, and eBook forms. In this current moment, it also feels good to help spawn more lifelong public library and local bookstore patrons!

Few things feel more essential right now than leisure and play, and activities like leisure reading can bring a deeper sense of meaningfulness to our lives in a way that job skills on their own don’t necessarily. By becoming an audiobook reader and developing a new literacy, I’ve been able to tap into this feeling more than I have in years, and I’m endlessly grateful that I was able to release my format perfectionism and regain one of my favorite things to do. I’m excited to keep exploring how to center play, leisure, and reading in my life and librarianship.

References

Deniz, F., Nunez-Elizalde, A. O., Huth, A. G., & Gallant, J. L. (2019). The representation of semantic information across human cerebral cortex during listening versus reading is invariant to stimulus modality. Journal of Neuroscience, 39(39), 7722-7736. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0675-19.2019

Freire, Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum.

hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.

Krashen, Stephen. 2004. The power of reading: Insights from the research. Libraries Unlimited.

Summer Break Book Recommendations: Critical Pedagogy, AI, and More

With summer break around the corner, I’m eagerly beginning to plan what books I might read this summer (maybe this is the year I’ll finally crack open Emily Wilson’s Iliad . . .). I’m also reflecting on the books I read this year as I prepared to teach my own course, an AI literacy elective, for the first time. Today, as we ease ourselves into summer break, I want to share four quickfire reviews of books I’ve recently read about pedagogy and AI. If you’re looking for something to read this summer, I hope you find something intriguing in this list!

I won’t bury the lede: Pedagogy of Freedom by Paulo Freire is the most impactful book I read this academic year. This book is a necessary antidote to how higher education is currently (de)valued, understood, and discussed, and it helped me refocus my teaching philosophy. Many people argue that politics should be removed from the classroom, but as Freire reminds us, education is inherently political because there can be no democracy without an educated population. While I do think post-graduation outcomes like salary and job placement can be part of how we evaluate a university, particularly when students take on so much debt to acquire a degree, it should not be the end of the conversation. Exemplary institutions, programs, and teachers do as Freire says: foster lifelong learning, develop critical thinking skills, and graduate students who are locally engaged and, yes, tuned in to the injustice around them with the desire, skills, and knowledge to make change.

Next up: The Skillful Teacher by Stephen D. Brookfield (third edition), a recommendation from my wonderful colleague Angie. This is an engaging, down-to-earth guide to teaching, filled with practical tips and examples of assignments, instructor feedback, and rubrics. I found the chapters on critical thinking and classroom discussion particularly useful, and I plan to try several of the discussion activities in my course. I also appreciate how Brookfield grounds his philosophy about teaching college in the context of adult education studies, and I think he has a keen understanding of college students today. This edition was published in 2015, so some material about emerging technologies and teaching online may be outdated; however, it’s still a worthwhile read on the whole, particularly for those seeking concrete tips and examples.

Finally, I read two books about AI (both recommendations from my wonderful colleague Aj). Mastering AI by Jeremy Kahn is an accessible, engaging introduction to AI issues across society, including education, medicine, politics, business, and more. At times, Kahn is more bullish on AI than I would be, but in general, I think he fairly represents and evaluates both AI-critical and AI-optimist viewpoints. This is a book I would share with my mom or another layperson who wants to understand what’s going on with AI but feels overwhelmed trying to follow the news. If an unlimited ebook license were available to us, I would assign excerpts from this book as readings in my course.

Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford is more scholarly than Mastering AI, but for a scholarly text, it falls on the more digestible side. Crawford focuses on making visible the invisibilized human and environmental harms of AI, like the electricity costs of data centers, the brutality behind mining rare earth elements, and the psychological trauma endured by content moderators in the Global South. She effectively punctures the idea of AI as something abstract, far away, “in the cloud,” grounding these tools in human blood and sweat. This is essential reading for those concerned about the planetary and human costs of AI.

Finally, some non-work-related book recommendations to wrap up this post 🙂

I Was the Jukebox by Sandra Beasley
With My Back to the World by Victoria Chang
Ararat by Louise Glück
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Ghosts by Edith Wharton

What have you been reading recently (library-related or not)? What do you plan to read this summer? Please share in the comments below!

A year of reading: 6 books from 2025

Is it too late for a round-up post of the books I read this past year? I don’t really think so (or care, actually); I’d love to talk about a few of the 56 books I read this year. This has been my highest reading year since I was probably a middle schooler, and I’m really pleased with the mixture of work-related books versus the fiction I read for pleasure. I’ll focus on those work-related ones, since this is a blog about academic librarianship, after all, but I’ll throw a few novels in there for good measure (and maybe for you academic librarians to add them to your leisure reading collections?).

During 2025, I spent a lot of time co-authoring a book chapter that addresses Generative AI, libraries, and social justice. I also did a few presentations that addressed GenAI, inevitability narratives, and critical interrogation of the technology. This informed most of my work-related reads, which included two of my seven 5-star reads of 2025: Imagination: A Manifesto by Ruha Benjamin and The AI Con by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna.

Imagination is a book I’m going to continue coming back to again and again as a guiding principle for my life as a whole, but most certainly in the career I lead as a librarian. It’s a short read, only 192 pages, but those 192 pages make you remember that imagination as an essential part of social change; there has to be a vision, and you have to dare to have that vision despite what the world is telling you. Imagination is not something that should be relegated to the very young or to the creative professions; it can and should lead us to questions, to answers, to a dream that seems impossible but maybe it’s not. The main voices we are hearing right now are the “techno-utopianists,” those lauding things like Generative AI as what’s going to save us. Save who? From what? This quote from the book continues to resonate with me: “Meanwhile, the dominant story told by techno-utopianists to lull us to sleep is that the world’s major crises can be solved with even more investment in their energy-intensive digital dreams, which usually also means less public participation and collective dreaming” (108).

The AI Con is an accessible rebuke to the AI hype that we’ve been seeing not only all around the librarianship profession, but in the world at large. Bender and Hanna do a wonderful job of laying everything out in an approachable format. Bender has been writing in this field for a long time; she was a co-author on the instrumental conference proceeding, “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots” from 2021. Hanna is the Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). Bender and Hanna run the podcast, Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000. If you’re going to read anything that addresses Generative AI, make it this book. I really appreciated that they had a section for information literacy and libraries specifically near the end of the book as well. They talk about the inherent lack of friction when you do a “search” with a chatbot LLM interface rather than using something like a database. Many of us as librarians know that friction is a good thing; it forces you to think more deeply and critically about your topic and the keywords, you might find sources that cause you to think differently, and friction will make you more likely to ask for help from the experts. This quote I think captures a lot from the book: “AI hype reduces the human condition to one of computability, quantification, and rationality” (32).

I also read Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sara Wynn-Williams and Empire of AI by Karen Hao, which are both deep dives into two of the biggest tech companies and their founders: Facebook/Meta and OpenAI. Wynn-Williams’ book is very focused on her personal experience while at the Facebook company with Mark Zuckerberg, which Hao is an outsider looking in on Sam Altman and OpenAI’s many controversies over the years. Hao also makes an explicit connection between GenAI, empire, and colonialism: “they, too, seize and extract previous resources to feed their vision of artificial intelligence: the work of artists and writers; the data of countless individuals posting about their experiences and observations online; the land, energy, and water required to house and run massive data centers and supercomputers” (I read this one on Kindle, so I don’t have a page number). Both of these books gave me a solid foundation and things to consider about these tech companies that infiltrate so much of life and the information landscape these days.

Finally, I wanted to talk about a couple of the fiction books that reminded me of how much I love the written word. The first 5-star read of my 2025 was Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino, which is a beautiful pondering on what it means to be human. The premise is that Adina, born in Philadelphia, is able to contact her extraterrestrial relatives via a fax machine. She sends regular reports on how Earthlings behave and act. It’s one of those books where I had to stop after certain passages and just think and feel what I was feeling. One of my other 5-stars was Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth, which I read in a single day. It is set in the early 1990s in the Irish village of Crossmore, following main character Lucy as she navigates falling in love with her school friend Susannah in her very traditional small town. Howarth’s prose is truly beautiful and sends you on a winding emotional roller coaster (because that’s how adolescence feels). I bought this one from a local bookstore for our book club, and it is FULL of highlights and notes from me. This book too is absolutely one that I will be returning to.

What were your big books from 2025? Are there any that you’re really looking forward to reading for 2026? I am currently making my way through Critical Data Storytelling by Kate McDowell and, like most librarians, my to-read list is never ending.

Authors Against Book Bans

Editor’s note: We welcome a guest post from Jessica Olin, who was in the library field for close to twenty years, both as a librarian and a library director. For eight of those years, they were also responsible for the well known blog, Letters to a Young Librarian.

Why is a former academic librarian and library director writing for ACRLog? Because I want to talk to you about an organization I joined last year, an organization I’m hoping you’ll join as well: Authors Against Book Bans. We are doing important work and I’m hoping you’ll join your voices to ours.

Let me begin by sharing our mission statement:

We are Authors Against Book Bans.

We, a coalition of writers, illustrators, anthology editors and contributors, and other book creators, stand united against the deeply unconstitutional movement to limit the freedom to read. We unequivocally support the availability of diverse voices on our library shelves, in our schools, and in our culture. We pledge to band together against the oppression of literature, to speak when our voices are silenced, to go where our bodies are needed, and to fight as one to ensure this freedom. Together, we will be fearless.

Our concern is not only for the books themselves, but for the children, families, educators, librarians, and communities who suffer when the freedom to read is challenged and taken away. We abhor the current organized attempts to censor books in schools and libraries across our nation, particularly in view of their insidious targeting of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ stories, the erasing of history, and silencing of voices that speak truthfully about essential human experiences. The great power of literature is its ability to create empathy, foster self-empowerment, impart knowledge, and enhance diversity of thought. We will defend this power from those who seek to subvert it.

As authors and as members of our local and national communities, we pledge to protect the rights of all young people to access the books they need and deserve.

So many of the people reading this right now are more than librarians and educators: you’re authors, too. I was an author long before I published my first work of fiction. I’ll admit I didn’t think of myself that way back then. I was more concerned with getting my ideas out into the world while also making my CV and my annual report look good.

Another thing I should admit is that book bans weren’t something I necessarily worried about when I was still in academia. I was more concerned with budgets and faculty buy-in, with preserving institutional history in the archives and fighting for library instruction inclusion in the broader curriculum. The one time someone tried to question the way my library ran our collection, upper administration and I laughed about it briefly then moved onto other topics. I felt, and really was, removed from that kind of thing.

But that’s not the truth anymore. Earlier this year, the United States Naval Academy saw the removal of nearly 400 books from its library under the order of the Defense Secretary. Earlier this month, that spread to all military educational institution library collections (as discussed here on ACRLog in a post by Violet Fox). It’s not just military schools, either. Whole programs are being cut to satisfy misguided and unconstitutional dictates on both local and national levels. Your libraries aren’t immune, and it will only get worse from here.

This is why we need to fight. And fight we are.

Here are some recent victories:

HB 1539/SB 1692, the Florida “Material Harmful to Minors” law, is officially dead for the 2025 legislative season. According to Florida Freedom to Read, an organization with boots on the ground in that state, AABB was a huge part of that.
Texas voters elected a big group of freedom to read candidates in school board elections across the state. Members of AABB created candidate score cards in concert with Texas Freedom to Read, that helped inform the electorate.

And now I’ll circle back to what I said in the opening paragraph: I proposed this guest post because I’m hoping you’ll join with us. This is the kind of organization that you really can have as little or as much involvement as you’d like. For some of our members, it’s like signing a petition – and having your name on our rolls is a valuable contribution you can make. That’s how I started. You can also get more involved – like the thirty-eight separate emails I wrote to Florida legislators opposing a bad law, or supporting authors who are facing bans, or even this blog post I’m writing.

Yes, AABB is racking up the wins, but there’s so much more to do. We need more voices for such important work. Add your voice to ours. We’re stronger together.

Notes on a Banned Books Class

Last semester, I taught my first semester-long class at the community college where I work. Many community colleges offer both credit courses and classes that are for continuing education, workforce training, and recreation — my class was one of these, based on a class that a previous librarian taught.

That librarian presented a series of discussions of literary classics, largely ones that were banned in the 1960s-1980s. When I took over the class, I focused on recent examples of books that have been targeted by book challenges and bans, since that has been a relentless topic in the news. I selected most of my titles from the past few years of ALA’s Top 10 Most Challenged Books lists. I had about 10 students, most of whom were older members of the community from the surrounding county.

I explained the difference between challenges and bans, and we looked at the landscape of book bans in the United States — where challenges take place (mainly school and public libraries) and who initiates them (until recently, individual and small groups of parents). We also discussed how the process to investigate challenges works in different types of libraries and the role that public comment and citizen advocacy can play in resisting book bans and other types of censorship.

Infographic from ALA's Censorship by the numbers — Censorship by the Numbers, ALA

By covering titles that are on current lists of challenged books, our conversation felt urgent and relevant to the lives of my students. We talked about the troubling trend of challenging books that feature LGBTQ+ characters or themes, as well as discussions of race and racism.

Banned in the USA: The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools, PEN America

We began each class period with a discussion of each book’s themes and literary or storytelling merit. When it came time to evaluate the reasons each book was banned, students frequently found these book-ban objections to be cherry-picked and politically motivated.

Respectful debate is possible
In the first class period, we discussed “ground rules” for a civil exchange of ideas in this classroom. I was bracing myself for heated conversation, since we were reading books that addressed sensitive topics. But I found my students to be open-minded and respectful, and that spending time with these characters increased empathy and curiosity about different perspectives. It was gratifying to find that people in a small, safe environment were willing to be vulnerable and open with each other.

It’s OK to over-prepare…
Like any first-time teacher, I over-prepared for this class for sure, but I quickly found a groove. I brought a lot of statistics (thanks to the incredibly detailed reports from PEN America and ALA), which helped contextualize specific examples from different school districts and public libraries in the US. I tried to resist the urge to enthusiastically “info-dump” or guide students toward the conclusions I was entering the classroom with.

…but leave lots of room for where the conversation can go.
I remember for my first class, where we discussed Melissa by Alex Gino (a middle-grade novel about a transgender girl in 4th grade), I expected a lot of questions from my students about gender-affirming healthcare for children and adults. Instead, students honed in on the different types of allies in the book, and a rich discussion emerged on how to be a good ally and make spaces safer wherever we go.

When I first encountered Banned Books Week as a new librarian in 2015, book bans felt like a quaint, relatively nonthreatening relic of history to me. I remember making making simple book displays with imagery of fire or prison bars (lots of red and black construction paper), highlighting the “silly” reasons people challenge books. And I’ve heard critiques of Banned Books Week as being a complacent celebration of individual classics, that takes the focus away from the pressing issue of coordinated censorship attempts going on right now. PEN America’s Banned Books 2022 report sums it up well:

Many Americans may conceive of challenges to books in schools in terms of reactive parents, or those simply concerned after thumbing through a paperback in their child’s knapsack or hearing a surprising question about a novel raised by their child at the dinner table. However, the large majority of book bans underway today are not spontaneous, organic expressions of citizen concern. Rather, they reflect the work of a growing number of advocacy organizations that have made demanding censorship of certain books and ideas in schools part of their mission.
Banned in the USA: The Growing Movement to Ban Books

The banned books game has changed, and it’s more important now than ever for librarians and library users to be able to clearly articulate just what is so harmful about this phenomenon. Even in academia, where we are more confident in our academic freedom of speech, we need to be vigilant about the right to read. It’s an issue of democracy, diversity, and freedom for all of us.

I adapted this excellent Bookriot article into a one-page handout with specifics on how community members can resist book bans and other censorship attempts on a local level: Combating Censorship in Your Community. Please feel free to continue to adapt and share this resource if it is relevant to your academic library!