Author: Maren Williams

Partial Victory in Singapore: Two Out of Three Books Back in Libraries

Singapore Communications and Information Minister Yaacob Ibrahim last week reversed course on the planned destruction of two children’s books that had been pulled from public library shelves, instructing the National Library Board to instead have the books restored to library…

CBLDF Joins Defense of Looking for Alaska in Wisconsin

Last week CBLDF joined a coalition of free speech groups defending John Green’s novel Looking for Alaska against a challenge from a parent who wants it removed from schools in Waukesha, Wisconsin. In a letter sent Friday on behalf of…

Russian Media Watchdog Says Avengers May Incite Violence, Cruelty

A Russian government media regulator is investigating an upcoming Avengers comic as “propaganda of a cult of violence,” possibly resulting in an official warning to Swedish publisher Egmont which distributes the books in Russia. The government is particularly concerned about…

Google Requires Music Site to Censor Album Covers

Google appears to be cracking down on websites that use its advertising service on their pages alongside any content that the search giant deems to be “adult or mature.” In the case of UK music magazine Drowned in Sound, the…

Singapore Censorship Continues With Archie: The Married Life 3

More bad news out of Singapore: in the wake of a ban on three children’s books featuring same-sex parents from the city-state’s libraries, today we learned that the government has also barred booksellers from importing Archie: The Married Life vol.…

Tango, Two Other Books Banned From Singapore Libraries

Last week Singapore’s National Library Board, a government agency that oversees public libraries in the city-state, announced that all copies of three children’s books that mention same-sex adoptive parents have been removed from library collections and will be destroyed. One…

Militants Call for Death of The 99 Creator

Last week the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the militant group better known as ISIS, took a brief timeout from overtaking cities in Iraq to call for the death of Kuwaiti-American comic creator Naif Al-Mutawa. They claimed on Twitter…

Nationwide Advocates Rally in Defense of Cameron Post

In the weeks since it became known that a Delaware school board removed emily m. danforth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post as an option on a summer reading list for incoming freshman, we’ve seen a fantastic and heartening response from…

Long-Ago Book Challenge Illustrates Importance of Library Policy

In the first half of the 20th century public libraries were strictly for edification, not entertainment. Most librarians thought nothing of excluding or removing from their collections books that were considered too frivolous (comics chief among them, of course) or…

Lost Girls Rated 18+ by New Zealand Government Censors

Almost a year ago, Auckland City Libraries in New Zealand declined to add Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls to their collection, fearing prosecution under the country’s child pornography laws. The book was subsequently submitted for review by the…