Library fight riles up city, leads to book-burning demand

Story Highlights

• Wisconsin couple say some books too risque for library's young-adult section
• Library refuses request to move some books to adult section, setting up showdown
• Group not connected to couple files claim against city, seeks book burning
• Issue sparks debate at meetings and on airwaves and blogs

By Jason Hanna
(CNN) -- A fight over books depicting sex and homosexuality has riled up a small Wisconsin city, cost some library board members their positions and prompted a call for a public book burning.

The battle has stirred much of West Bend, a city of roughly 30,000 people about 35 miles north of Milwaukee. Residents have sparred for months on blogs, airwaves and at meetings, including one where a man told the city's library director he should be tarred and feathered.

The row even spread to this year's Fourth of July parade, which included a float featuring a washing machine and a sign that read "keep our library clean."

"If you told me we would be going through a book challenge of this nature, I'd think, 'Never in a million years,' " said Michael Tyree, director of the West Bend Community Memorial Library.

The strife began in February when West Bend couple Jim and Ginny Maziarka objected to some of the content in the city library's young-adult section. They later petitioned the library board to move any sexually explicit books -- the definition of which would be debated -- from the young-adult section to the adult section and to label them as sexually explicit.

Ginny Maziarka, 49, said the books in the section of the library aimed at children aged 12 to 18 included homosexual and heterosexual content she thought was inappropriate for youths.

She and her husband also asked the library to obtain books about homosexuality that affirmed heterosexuality, such as titles written by "ex-gays," Maziarka said.

"All the books in the young-adult zone that deal with homosexuality are gay-affirming. That's not balance," she said.

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Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others

July 17, 2009, 12:57 pm
EDITOR’S NOTE | 8:41 p.m. The Times published an article explaining that the Orwell books were unauthorized editions that Amazon removed from its Kindle store. However, Amazon said it would not automatically remove purchased copies of Kindle books if a similar situation arose in the future.

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned. A screen shot from Amazon.com The MobileReference edition of the novel, “Nineteen Eighty-four,” by George Orwell that was deleted from Kindle e-book readers by Amazon.com.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

This is ugly for all kinds of reasons. Amazon says that this sort of thing is “rare,” but that it can happen at all is unsettling; we’ve been taught to believe that e-books are, you know, just like books, only better. Already, we’ve learned that they’re not really like books, in that once we’re finished reading them, we can’t resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final. As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.

You want to know the best part? The juicy, plump, dripping irony? The author who was the victim of this Big Brotherish plot was none other than George Orwell. And the books were “1984” and “Animal Farm.”

Scary.

Washington State Supreme Court Hears Internet Filtering Case

June 23, 2009

Oral arguments: Sarah Bradburn et al. v. North Central Regional Library District (Under the WA Constitution, must a library disable its internet filter to allow adult access to constitutionally protected content?).

The Washington state Supreme Court heard arguments June 23 in a challenge to the internet filtering policy of the North Central Regional Library, headquartered in Wenatchee. The American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit in 2006 on behalf of three library users and the pro-firearm Second Amendment Foundation, seeking that the library be required to disable its filters when requested by an adult for research or other lawful purposes, as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court when it upheld he Children’s Internet Protection Act in 2003.

Plaintiffs in Bradburn v. North Central Regional Library include a woman who sought to research on tobacco use by youth, a professional photographer blocked from using YouTube, and a man unable to access his own blog or locate information on gun use by hunters. The Second Amendment Foundation says the library blocked online access to its magazine Women and Guns.

Although no timeframe was announced for when the court will issue its ruling, attorneys speculated that the decision could take months, the Wenatchee World reported June 23.

—Gordon Flagg, American Libraries Online Posted on June 25, 2009.