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 *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.
The FBI investigating a bombing? Yeah.
State cops investigating a murder? 50/50 odds?
Local cops investigating someone swapping out a fucking lightbulb? No.
People inside the oppressive regime will unwittingly buy smart bulbs, that only activate after enough were smuggled in at the same date, so that by the time the regime detects some, all bulbs will be traced to non-refugee sellers outside its jurisdiction, absolving any unwitting participants buying and powering them, so it's important the ad doesn't advertise any quirks or functionality added, as that would compromise the buyers.
By having the sellers be random foreigners (from the perspective of the oppressive regime), the regime can't punish the family of the refugees sponsoring this infiltration, if it doesn't know which refugee friends the seller has (so it should also be a low contact friend, so the refugee would have to convince a friend to do one large batch once, and never meet again..., which is a bit sad).
This assumes commercial entities aren't selling friend network data, or if they do, that oppressive regimes somehow can't get their hands on it. A rather dubious assumption in 2026...
If you have a problem with storing illegal books in your "banned book library", you may be working on the wrong project.
And how does that differ from including banned books?
This is a perfectly sensible set of sample and example books. The project is the book distribution system, not the books themselves.
You load yours up with whatever you think is important or whatever you are willing to risk.
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.
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.
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.
that was the only point I was making. Mein Kraft, Selected Works of Lmao The Dong, and The Anarchist Cookbook may be removed from sale/access in some specific locations, but it is very much legal to buy, own, and sell them.
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... )
And your "historically banned" is just "occasionally removed from public school libraries on parental request". Not using tax money to promote them to children is a low, low bar for "banned". While actual availability is, of course, completely ignored. Whatever tells the best story, facts be damned.
[1] Jared Taylor's Banned Conference Speech - https://www.arktosjournal.com/p/jared-taylors-banned-confere...
[2] Ohio universities involve FBI in investigation of ‘It’s okay to be white’ and white nationalist group’s postings on campus - https://www.thefire.org/news/ohio-universities-involve-fbi-i...
There's an alternate reality where white supremacy is mainstream, where queer fiction is impossible to find, and that would be a different world.
Instead, what's being preserved are the books written that celebrate the values that match our broad cultural values, despite a handful of cultural deviants attempting to suppress the parts of the rest of humanity they dislike.
It's a mouthful, but at least you'll be honest for once.
That's a significant impugnment of the honesty of a person you know nothing about.
"Banned books" is the colloquial term for these books, even if it's not as accurate as you'd personally prefer.
Next thing you'll be complaining you bit into an Apple and got computer instead of fruit.
Yes, many people are either unaware of, or willing participants in, this lie. That doesn't make it any less of a lie.
You're just pissy because they aren't using your personal favorite parameters around "banned" for "by whom" and "for whom". You're pretending your opinion is fact and therefore anyone who disagrees must be a liar.
And even in high schools screening R-rated movies is generally heavily restricted. Where it is allowed, it generally requires a permission slip from the parents. And that's not like showing gratuitous films, but ones with historically relevant and educational context like e.g. Schindler's List.
So why is it unreasonable for parents (or other interested parties) to be against having such material in a children's library? In many ways its quite odd that a rating system was never adopted for books. And for one other question, do you even see a difference between these sort of books being restricted from schools, and other books whose content would be generally be rated appropriate for children, being banned on political/ideological basis? Because to me the difference is not only tremendous but the defining issue here.
"My" list? I don't have a list. If you're talking about OP's list, I disagree with that. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are not sexual books. From what I know of many of the other more recent books people have tried to ban, I absolutely would not agree the ratings would be R/NC17 for those either. Here's a list of PG13 (And PG!) movies with nudity. https://www.imdb.com/list/ls548607223/
I agree that 7 year olds should not be shown sexual content. There exists content with sexual themes which are appropriate for teenagers.
Also, the comment you replied to is downthread in an argument over whether it's a "lie" to call books that someone banned, a banned book.
We no longer say that "cannabis is illegal in California"; that would be factually incorrect. Instead we say, "cannabis was formerly illegal". In standard usage of English, the same pattern applies to banned vs formerly banned books.
Edit: wording
It deliberately conveys an impression that is opposite of the truth. But feel free to continue to split hairs and twist words to argue that technically you're not actually lying.
Just because you decided to interpret something one way, doesn't mean it was a deliberate choice by the other party, nor does it mean your interpretation is common.
> technically you're not actually lying.
What did I say that you consider a lie? Could you quote me?
I thought we would all be over this after the dr seuss thing.
It's been a while since I used the github gist 'download zip' functionality. Quite handy.
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
Y'know, there's really only one reason to be coy about whether you agree with Neo-Nazi propaganda.
Well. I seem to have triggered something.
> Ah yes, because the only people that have ever spread propaganda are Neo-Nazis
Not something I ever said or implied.
> and we should only ever learn about the sanitized and approved version of history from our Robert Maxwell (Ghislane Maxwell's Mossad agent father / McGraw Hill co-founder) published textbooks.
I find it interesting who just happens to know who else is Jewish, and then feels the need to interject that into utterly irrelevant contexts.
> Never mind that there are two sides to every story, and when it comes to history, only the victors get to tell theirs.
No, I'm pretty sure a lot of losers have been able to have their sides heard. It's just that, well, people lose for a reason, and losers tend to be less popular among normal people. Ranting about subhumans can do that, you know.
> We don't even learn about the 23+ million massacred by the Bolsheviks in school.
I would be interested to know who exactly you call a Bolshevik, but I did get taught the history of the USSR in school, at least, and "One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich" is not a ringing endorsement.
However, nobody was talking about Bolsheviks until you decided to use them as a distraction.
> But yeah - only one reason to consider a different perspective other than the one forced down your throat by the public education system.
I didn't need the public education system to teach me to hate genocidal racists, thank you.
> Not something I ever said or implied.
No but you said there was only a single reason to agree with "Neo-Nazi" propaganda as if agreeing with any propaganda is rational. There's a reason it's called propaganda after all. It's not like there weren't deplorable crimes being committed by the Soviets / US / France / Britain and they certainly had their fair share of propaganda during WWI and WWII depicting Germans as barbarians / sub-human / etc...
> I find it interesting who just happens to know who else is Jewish, and then feels the need to interject that into utterly irrelevant contexts.
How is the owner of the second largest publisher of textbooks in the US, and the fact that he served in a Zionist intelligence organization in the US, irrelevant when it comes to what people learn about WWII and propaganda? Please explain.
> No, I'm pretty sure a lot of losers have been able to have their sides heard. It's just that, well, people lose for a reason, and losers tend to be less popular among normal people. Ranting about subhumans can do that, you know.
I've already addressed this above.
> I would be interested to know who exactly you call a Bolshevik, but I did get taught the history of the USSR in school, at least, and "One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich" is not a ringing endorsement.
Are you disputing the well-recorded fact that tens of millions of innocents were killed by the Bolsheviks over the span of about 40 years? Why don't we learn about the Holodomor in the US in grade school? I don't need to explain who the Bolsheviks were - anyone who doesn't already know, can perform a basic internet search to figure that out.
> However, nobody was talking about Bolsheviks until you decided to use them as a distraction.
A distraction? How is me pointing out that history isn't objective and that there are two sides to every story, yet we only learn about one, a distraction? It's highly relevant to the conversation and the GP's post.
> I didn't need the public education system to teach me to hate genocidal racists, thank you.
I never said you did - but if it were me, I'd want to make sure I considered both sides of a historical event before deciding which direction to aim my hatred, if I was into such endeavors. I personally believe that war is a racket, and that there are no good guys in evil and corrupt wars (WWII was definitely one of those, same with WWI). I'm also not naive enough to believe that there wasn't atrocious behavior on both sides of either war. Nor am I going to label anyone who has the gall to question the prevailing narrative or say it is incorrect in some capacity, a Neo-Nazi.
We're only talking about one political group here. The group that published The Turner Diaries. The group that can't help but mention who's Jewish. Bringing up other groups is a distraction tactic, aside from how dishonest it is. Yes, we are taught that everyone did morally questionable things in WWII. But only one group ran a Dachau.
> How is the owner of the second largest publisher of textbooks in the US, and the fact that he served in a Zionist intelligence organization in the US, irrelevant when it comes to what people learn about WWII and propaganda? Please explain.
OK, let's get down to brass tacks: Do you think people only believe the Holocaust happened and was bad because a Jewish man published a lot of textbooks?
> Are you disputing the well-recorded fact that tens of millions of innocents were killed by the Bolsheviks over the span of about 40 years?
Are you disputing the fact eleven million people were killed by a concerted effort on the part of Nazi Germany to eliminate people it considered subhuman for various reasons?
I don't dispute the vile stain on the history of state Communism. I hate Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot and Hoxha and Kim Il-Sung just as much as the next normal person. But we're talking about why someone wouldn't distribute The Turner Diaries and, I have to say, the Communists didn't commit that little literary peccadillo.
> Why don't we learn about the Holodomor in the US in grade school?
Because there are fewer people waving hammer-and-sickle flags around than there are spray-painting swastikas on synagogues and Raising Questions about whether the Holocaust was so bad after all.
> I never said you did - but if it were me, I'd want to make sure I considered both sides of a historical event before deciding which direction to aim my hatred, if I was into such endeavors.
That's funny, the more I learn about WWII the less I feel the Nazis had a legitimate side. They were a bunch of losers lead around by a drugged-up corporal who ran his country into the ground with gross mismanagement to the point Germany, once the jewel of European science and industry, was split in half and lived a shadow existence as the puppet of two world powers for a half century after his reign.
> I personally believe that war is a racket, and that there are no good guys in evil and corrupt wars (WWII was definitely one of those, same with WWI).
The corruption in WWII was the starting of it, which falls directly at the feet of the Nazis and Imperial Japan. Self-defense is not corruption, and neither is ending the reign of expansionist tyrants. Or do you think people don't have the right to defend themselves from your pet dictators?
> I'm also not naive enough to believe that there wasn't atrocious behavior on both sides of either war.
Only one side ran death camps. Both sides imprisoned people unjustly, but only one side turned them into ashes. It doesn't balance out.
> Nor am I going to label anyone who has the gall to question the prevailing narrative or say it is incorrect in some capacity, a Neo-Nazi.
No, the only people I call Neo-Nazis are the ones triggered when I say the Nazis were, on the whole, bad for everyone around them.
Those of us who paid attention certainly did.
Go on then.
Say what you mean.
That doesn’t mean Nazi Germany wasn’t utterly disgusting though.
Of course they aren't. But that's no argument for distributing it.
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.
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...
Those aren’t banned books though. They are books that used to be banned in another century.
It’s like saying “I’m a criminal because I criticized the Pope”.
as has been covered in multiple comments elsewhere in the thread, the "banned" books that are checked-in to the repo are examples that were used because they're in the public domain.
- Commissioner Pravin Lal, Datalinks
Alpha Centauri pertinent as ever.
Best 4x game of all time. The 2060 that game envisioned seems closer everyday.
Peak of complexity and maturism in games...
Although, I dread to think what sort of files one would get when user uploads are allowed.
1: > I was talking with a friend about this idea and the storage limitation and he thought it would be cool to have these devices form a mesh network
2: https://meshtastic.org/docs/community/enclosures/rak/harbor-...
I can't wait until it's formalized enough that I can just buy a $20 light bulb, update it wirelessly somehow, and then have my own little "light bulb library" server.
Reads like you had fun, keep up the hacking!
P.S main -> mail I think?
However I haven't actually played with this and don't know if that would work, or if the network would require DNS to function properly.
"Since the device is a light bulb, it would be difficult to detect and likely to go unnoticed."
I doubt it would be any harder to shut down than any other public-access WiFi device, just a bit of experimentation with turning off power / devices would find it.
LoRa is also sub-optimal for payloads more than a few K in size and most ePub files are at least a meg...
Take a look at HaLow if you insist, but in general if a bulb has esp32 then you could likely replace the module for one with LoRA capabilities.
I’ll grant that some of the restrictions seem overprotective. That being said, a parent could easily check out one of those books for their child.
Purely obscene material is also not protected by the 1st, but since the 1970s, the bar for that has been placed very, very high.
The closest I can think of offhand is that for about a year during the pandemic, Twitter suppressed gratuitous COVID misinformation posts, at the request of the government.
When people say "banned book" they mean that a certain level of government such as a school board or municipality has "banned" them from being in a public (often school) library.
But the headline "In [state I disagree with] they are banning books that have [ideas I agree with]" makes a lot more headlines and clicks.
Then people run with the phrase "banned books" to make things sound worse than they are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_banning_in_the_United_Sta...
USA is ultra conservative on the average in comparison to just any European state for example.
Now where the USA censors routinely is financial censorship. If you can afford the thing thats fincially banned, the sure, its not banned. But if you cant afford it, youre screwed.
And, if you work for a company, they can fire you for any/no reason, INCLUDING your speech off work.
In the USA, its "freedom of speech" if youre independently wealthy. If not, hope you dont offend power.
Very cool project nonetheless!
The majority of "banned books" are books that a random school district/religious school in a conservative part of the country elected not to include in their library at some point. Many of them are required reading in many other school districts and some of the most well known books of the 20th century.
The closer-to-banned ones are generally not included on banned-book-reading-lists and are banned on major retail platforms and long out of print and tend to be racist and/or genuinely subversive to liberal democratic principles. Most of these tend to be some of the most-downloaded-books-on-the-internet, and are also in no way illegal to own in the US - though possession of many is illegal in much of the EU.
An interesting case is United States vs Progressive inc [0] in which the US dropped a lawsuit to prevent a magazine from publishing a how-to guide on building an H bomb and Defense Distributed vs United States Department of State [1] in which the US federal government settled and allowed for the publishing of 3d printed gun files online, previously prevented under arms exports claims.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Progressive,_.... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Distributed_v._United_...
A library can choose what books they stock (especially a school library. Of course they're highly curated.). You don't have to agree with their choices, but the book isn't banned. You can still find it at a county library, an ebook library, or on the Internet.
So it's a bit dramatic to say "I'm fighting the system by hosting banned books!", just because some Tennessee elementary schoolers can't check it out from their school library. Just feels like a joke and a mockery when there's governments that genuinely censor books.
Edit: per the other comment's Wikipedia link, the unredacted Operation Dark Heart seems banned in the US because it included classified info
Although copyright-infringing books may be illegal to redistribute in general, the difficulty in determining what counts as copyright infringement and what counts as fair use means you can't really tell for sure which books are illegal to distribute and which aren't, so I'm not sure that really counts as "banned". 60 Years Later had an actual court order which makes things a little more concrete.
Having been in prison, I can tell you that being a Blood and having "certain books" in your locker is a "smash on sight" offense. The same could be said for the Aryan Brotherhood/Circle, and I'm sure for many other gangs.
There's a difference between "this one small group: local oklahoma school district/aryan brotherhood/catholic church" decided they don't like a book and the government level you will be imprisoned for owning/sharing this book.
If it's a 'banned' book library, why doesn't it include books banned by a variety of sources? To me, a 'banned' book library would included many thousands of books each tagged by which groups are banning them. That way, were I inclined to do so, I could read texts that were banned by both Jews and Christians, or by both democratic nations and totalitarian regimes, or whatever it was that I was interested in.
This particular compilation is a perfect example. Calling The Call of the Wild, a book that's been made in to several movies (the most recent of which grossing $111.1 million against a production budget of $125–150 million) a "banned book" is kind of ludicrous, no? Clearly many thousands or millions of people have access to it and it's contents, so it is clearly not 'banned' in any meaningful sense of the term, unless you happen to live in some region in which it is banned, but that enforces my claim that any such random small list doesn't really live up to the label.
In the article example, to deny this because of a technically or the degree of legal enforcement is foolish since it is rebelling against the act of banning books, the process of banning, which doesn't occur out of thin air, it is an evolution of acts. It is not an absolute and one doesn't have to wait until there is a legally defined ban to start the protest. That would be ridiculous as it would be too late.
I don't think the project is trying to make the Banned Library of Congress either, anyone could put whatever books they want on their server. It is suggesting civil disobedience by circumventing oppression through censorship with creativity, which is awesome.
The thing is that every other country does have what they're describing.
> The Color Purple has been challenged many times in order to be removed from public library circulation and public school curriculums.
And yet nobody challenged it to get it removed from US Amazon. Amazon _is_ forbidden from selling certain books in other countries. It's so not the same thing
I would put Kevin MacDonald's antisemitic trilogy The Culture of Critique, the Turner Diaries ( which calls for mass extermination of non-white groups in the USA ) and Mein Kampf in the realm of books that should be shunned.
Its ultra important for historical/social and linguistic education.
I read it when I was 14, and I'm from Poland.
It is AWFUL and PAINFUL to read due to the horrible styling - which amuses me to this day. :) That's why no need to ban it hehehe
Nowadays books are for intellectuals, not for the masses... That's why I would be ok for any modern teenager to read anything 18+ or anti-whatever books :) It's net positive no matter of content IMO.
I understand your discomfort with these books, and I actually agree that they deserve to be banned, but banning is not what we should do.
I guess when it comes to Freedom of Speech, you fall into the latter category.