Bitchin' Blog Posts
: Censorship
May 14, 2012 | Monday | 72 Comments
WTFery of the morning, as reported by Dianna Dilworth on GalleyCat: Brevard County Public Libraries in Florida have pulled their 19 copies of 50 Shades of Grey from the shelves. Why? HuffPo has a quote from Don Walker, a spokesman for the library, who said, "it's semi-porgnographic." The HuffPo article indicated that several other libraries in Florida had refused to purchase copies, but Brevard bought 19, then took them out of circulation, sending notices to the 200 or so people on a waiting list. Library services director Cathy Schweinsberg told Florida Today: Nobody asked us to take it off the shelves.…
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January 18, 2012 | Wednesday | 26 Comments
In one day, so many sites went black, and students everywhere lost their minds because they couldn't use Wikipedia. Many senators and representatives, including Orrin Hatch and Nancy Pelosi, publicly withdrew their support of SOPA and PIPA, and I heard at one point, though I can't find a link to confirm it, that so many people were calling their senators and congressional representative that the phone circuits overloaded. Co sponsors backed out and removed their sponsorship of the bill, and according to one tweet, 29 legislators announced opposition. Authors, musicians, actors and producers worked together to coordinate an effort to…
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August 19, 2010 | Thursday | 3 Comments
Thank you to everyone who entered the contest to win a copy of Ellen Hopkins’ book “Tricks.” While the story of her disinvitation to the Humble, Texas, Teen Lit Fest has been picked up by a few news outlets, I don’t know if anyone from Humble has contacted her - but I hope that the end result is that she is invited back. And if that’s not possible, I hope every teen in Humble reads her book and sends a review to both the librarian who protested Hopkins’ inclusion, and the superintendent who made the decision to rescind her invite.…
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April 16, 2009 | Thursday | 5 Comments
As Lindsay alerted me, two notable and amazing women died this week - and that their passing, and the significance of their lives and contributions may have been missed in the brouhaha surrounding #AmazonFail.
Judith F. Krug, founder of Banned Books Week, died of cancer in Evanston, IL. She was 69.
Ms. Krug was the director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. She also helped establish the Freedom to Read Foundation in 1969, an organization that in part helped defray litigation costs for freedom of speech cases.
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April 12, 2009 | Sunday | 227 Comments
Dampening my snickering glee at being ranked among Movements and Periods is the news that Amazon seems to be stripping the sales figures and accompanying rankings from GLBTQ books, erotica, and romance novels, particularly those with what they term “adult content.” In short: someone in Amazon has utter shit for brains. Authors such as Jaci Burton, Maya Banks, Larissa Ione and Stephanie Tyler have reported that since being stripped of their sales rankings, their titles are no longer found in searches on Amazon.com. MetaWriter is also compiling a list of titles that have been stripped of their sales rank. When…
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December 17, 2008 | Wednesday | 30 Comments
There have been a few reviews published this week on The Jewel of Medina. USA Today was hardly complimentary, and the New York Times was so sniffy I’m suspecting nasal spray was involved.
But I’m handing out penalties to the Times and to writer Lorraine Adams, because there are some serious flags on the play in her review.
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