It’s Banned Books Week this week, and we’re celebrating!

As Joan E. Bertin suggests over on Huffington Post, “for a country that venerates its First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech, the United States tries to ban books with alarming frequency.” Sadly, it isn’t only the USA that has banned books in the past, as this list of banned books on Wikipedia shows. As Cara noted over on the shiny new Internet Archive news blog, we have scans of quite a few previously banned books for you to gaze upon, including but not limited to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz:

There are also a bunch of Banned Book events and displays happening all over the USA this week if you’re interested! If you happen to know of any alternative online sources of any of these titles, please feel free to leave a comment to let us know. Or, you could add a link in the description on their Open Library pages.

On a side note, we released a little upgrade to the open source Book Reader this morning too – now you can print pages from within the book reader. There are lots of nice little touches, for example, if you’re looking at a fold-out page, the reader will change the page’s orientation on the fly to landscape. Nice work, Mang! (Mang’s the lead developer on the Book Reader. And also has a great list of beautiful books on his bookmarks page that he uses for testing.)