It turns out that the people who try to ban books because of their content end up just shooting themselves in the foot, as it were. A new study from researchers at the esteemed colleges Carnegie Mellon University and George Mason University found that the banning of a book just makes it more popular.
The researchers reviewed data collected from libraries and found that after it was reported that a certain book was the subject of a ban, demand for the book only increased.
Will you offer us a hand? Every gift, regardless of size, fuels our future.
Your critical contribution enables us to maintain our independence from shareholders or wealthy owners, allowing us to keep up reporting without bias. It means we can continue to make Jewish Business News available to everyone.
You can support us for as little as $1 via PayPal at office@jewishbusinessnews.com.
Thank you.
This is kind of like the old saying that “no publicity is bad publicity.” This is certainly true with any so called “controversial” new movie or television show.
Every time a group condemns or tries to have a show canceled because it does not like the program’s content for what they say are “moral” reasons or for having “indecent” content, the end result is always the same. The respective show is not removed from the airwaves and its ratings only go up.
The Simpsons, South Park, The Sopranos, NYPD Blue… the list goes on and on. And the same is true for many movies that benefitted at the box office when they otherwise might have been ignored.
Controversy is always good for business. It only brings notoriety to the person or item at its center. The groups that try to have things banned, in the end, merely provide free advertising for the subject of their ire and may have been better off just keeping their mouths shut.
But these people probably know that and don’t care. For them it’s about the cause and the politicians who support these causes use them for campaign issues and for fundraising.
As for the new study, the researchers said that in the US book banning has increased. Usually, it is local school boards and governments that decide to order the removal of certain books from the library shelves for one reason or another.
The new study used what the researchers said was a “large-scale” data set of US library book circulations to evaluate the impact of book bans on demand for banned books. The study found that circulations of books rose after being banned, banning a book in one state leads to increases in circulation of that book in states that did not ban the book, and bans that are transformed into political issues boost donations to Republican candidates.
“The primary goal of book bans is to restrict access to books, but conversations about the bans often garner attention on a wider scale,” explains Ananya Sen, assistant professor of information systems and economics at CMU’s Heinz College, who co-authored the study. “This increased attention can either deter people from reading the book or influence consumers to read it, which would be an unintended consequence.”
Researchers obtained book circulation data from a large library content and services supplier to major public and academic libraries in the United States; their data set contained more than 17,000 titles, including over 1,500 that were banned, as identified by 2021 and 2022 lists from the American Library Association and PEN America. The study’s authors said their goal was to determine what effect book bans by local schools and state bodies had on demand for the banned books.
What they found was that circulations of banned books increased 12% on average compared to similar non-banned titles after the ban.
Banning a book in one state led to an 11% increase in circulation of the book in states of different political leanings that did not ban the book, said the researchers. This increase, they found, often featured books by lesser-known authors, suggesting that new and relatively unknown authors gained from a rise in consumer support.
But, in what may be the most important effect the reaches found, efforts to transform book bans into a political issue—which the authors of the study define as politicization—tended to increase the amount of donations received by Republican House candidates relative to those received by Democratic House candidates, but only in Republican-leaning states.
“Book bans have become part of the national conversation and cultural debates, fueled by increasing concern about parental rights,” notes Uttara M. Ananthakrishnan, assistant professor of information systems at CMU’s Heinz College, who co-authored the study. “But our study highlights the pitfalls of politically motivated censorship on consumers’ consumption behavior.”
