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Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Read that Banned book, at google Books!


Celebrating the 25th anniversary of Banned Books Week, Google has opened up a whole bunch of banned books. The banned books (banned by various authorities due to various reasons) have kept millions of people away from gaining knowledge or being happy.
Following the threads at /., where I read first about this opportunity, It is fascinating that these books are banned. I had a good childhood and I was not banned from reading any books. Except when I caught up with paperbacks of
Louis L'Amour's paper backs, and skipped my school book. Even that was not a ban but a reduction of volume!
It hurts even to hear any one banning a book, where are we? in the middle ages?
Anyway back to /. threads, they have some gems there!
The best was by iamthedave (he mostly writes about beer on his blog), which matches most of my sentiments. Here they are;

It's cool - I've read about 60-70% of the books on the list. It's odd - Call of the Wild has been challenged? It's informative - I've just started reading The Satanic Verses, and now i have a new reading list It's missing? - I can't believe Fahrenheit 451 isn't on that list... It's scary - many people in the world are denied access to these books. It's scarier - many people in this country would have these books banned It's sad - in 100 years, who knows if we'll all still have access to these books. It's encouraging - challenges, even recently, to these books in schools and libraries have failed - let's hope history repeats itself in such a fashion for years to come. The Google books might be giving just previews and fear not, most of the books are on Project Gutenberg.
Thanks to google for being aware of social problems.

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