Read Banned Books: Reading books featured on this site
You should be able to read any of the books you find on
Read Banned Books,
by one means or another.
Read more about the books
If you'd like to learn more about the book first, follow the
Read about it links on the book's information page.
Those links might go to one or more of these websites:
- Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that anyone can read, and that has articles discussing many books featured here. Anyone can also edit these articles (though you might need to sign up for a Wikipedia account, and get some editing experience, before editing some of the more popular or contentious articles.)
- LibraryThing
and GoodReads are social media sites
where members can record information on books they've read or bought, post
ratings and reviews, and discuss them with others. You can generally read the descriptions
and reviews for free without registering, and you can register with the sites
to add your own information and comments.
Read the books online
Some of the books we feature can be read for free online.
Follow the
Read it online link, if one is available, to go to a catalog
record for the book on
The Online Books Page
(which is also the host of this exhibit). The catalog record will include
one or more links to free online editions you can read on your computer
or Internet-connected device. (Sometimes you'll be offered
a choice between different editions or websites for the book.) You may
also find additional links you can follow for more books by the same
author(s) or on similar subjects, or for other books or Wikipedia articles
that discuss the book in question.
We only include "Read it online" links when we know of editions that
are freely readable online with permission of the rightsholder, or that
are in the public domain. Many recent books are not available in
this manner, but can be borrowed from a library or bought from a bookseller.
Get books from a library
Your local library may offer many of these books. If they don't, you might
be able to get it from another library, or ask your library to order it
for you. (They might be able to get it from another library via
inter-library loan. In some cases, they might also decide to get
a copy for their own collection.)
Follow the
Borrow it from links to find a convenient library copy.
The links offered there may include:
- Your library: This link will let you search
the catalog of any of more than 1000 library systems, quite possibly
including your library. The first time you follow this link, you will
be asked to choose your preferred library, and your choice
will then be remembered in future searches (or until your web browser's
cookies reset, or you decide to switch to another library), so you don't
have to choose it again.
If your library's online catalog is shared
with other libraries in a local library system, you might need to choose
that library system as a whole rather than your specific library.
If you don't see your library or library system offered as a choice,
you can ask us to add it. (We can
add most libraries with an online catalog that anyone on the Internet
can search without logging in, and that
accept automated searches. Most public and university library
catalogs meet these requirements. Catalogs of school libraries,
or libraries with limited Internet connections or unusual library software,
might not.)
- Another library: This link will let you choose
a different library from the one you've previously selected as yours.
This can be useful if your preferred library doesn't have a book you're
interested in, but another library available to you might.
(You also use this link to change your preferred library.)
A few libraries may be of particular interest to readers who
can't find some of these books in their local libraries
(whether due to censorship or other reasons):
- For a limited time, the Brooklyn Public Library in New York is offering free
eCards to anyone in the US aged 13 to 21
through its Books Unbanned program.
These cards let you borrow and read books online from their extensive
collection of ebooks, which includes books that have been subject
to censorship elsewhere and books that have no generally free online edition.
The library's eCard is also always free to teenagers in New York State.
- The Seattle Public Library in Washington State
now has its own Books Unbanned program, offering its entire collection of ebooks and audiobooks to teens and young adults from 13 to 26 years old living anywhere in the United States.
- Bookriot has a rundown of other US libraries offering banned ebook access to adolescent and young adult readers nationwide.
- In many states, residents can register for free library cards for
libraries throughout the state (including libraries distant from their home),
which they can use to borrow ebooks for titles not available locally,
including books that may be banned in some locations. Ask your local librarian about what options are available to you for borrowing books from other libraries.
- Find a library with it (via WorldCat): This link will search OCLC's Worldcat.org for copies of book in libraries around the world. Once you follow a link to an edition you're interested in, it will list libraries near you that may have a copy. Not all libraries are included in WorldCat, and some are only shown under an "All libraries" tab separate from the "Featured libraries" tab it shows you by default, but their knowledge base includes holdings of thousands of libraries in North America and elsewhere.
Buy books from a bookseller
You can also buy most of the featured books. If you buy a print copy,
it's yours forever, and you can pass it along to someone else or otherwise
dispose of it as you wish. You can also often pay for instant access to
an ebook edition, though it might not be as long-lived or as transferable
as a print book.
Follow the
Buy it from links to search for the featured books in the catalogs of these vendors:
- Bookshop.org supports online ordering from over 1,000 independent bookstores. Books are shipped from company warehouses, with revenues shared with the affiliated bookstore of your choice. You can also use their website to find independent bookstores in your area that you can browse in person.
- Amazon is the ecommerce giant offering new and used print books and ebooks, as well as other consumer goods, for rapid delivery.
- Barnes and Noble is a chain offering both online ordering and in-person shopping in stores throughout the United States.
- Bookfinder.com lets you search and order new and used books from vendors across the globe. This site can be particularly useful for out-of-print or otherwise hard to find titles.
Privacy notes: Some websites linked here may include trackers that save
information about users and the books they search for or acquire, or
that send that information along to third parties like Google and Facebook.
Many online shops do this, but so do some library websites and catalogs,
including reportedly WorldCat.org. If this concerns you, ask your local librarian
for advice on how to protect your privacy online, and on vetting the policies
of sites you visit. Some programs used to read or acquire ebooks also
record detailed information about reader behavior.
Most libraries should delete records of what users have borrowed which books
after the books are returned, but
not all libraries do.
The Online Books Page has no third party trackers,
and its only logs of user activity are standard Apache HTTP server logs that
get deleted periodically. Book cover images in this
exhibit are delivered from our own server, and not from any external site.
Sites with free online copies that we link to may follow a variety of
data collection and privacy practices, but we identify the sites with online
books that we link to, so you can see who they are before you follow the links.
Edited by John Mark Ockerbloom (onlinebooks@pobox.upenn.edu), who is solely responsible for its content.
Read Banned Books is a featured exhibit of The Online Books Page and is subject to its copyrights and licenses.