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caseysoftwaretoday at 1:12 PM3 repliesview on HN

Are those just banned and censored in Portugal specifically or the EU as a whole?

A quick check here in the States showed all of them available on Amazon for under $25 each.


Replies

Aurornistoday at 1:28 PM

> A quick check here in the States showed all of them available on Amazon for under $25 each.

The term “banned books” has become a pop culture meme. In this context it doesn’t literally mean banned, it means the book wasn’t allowed somewhere. In extreme cases a government in a controlling country may have forbidden the book.

However in a lot of cases the “banned books” were just not allowed in some school’s library for kids somewhere.

That’s why all of the books aren’t actually banned in the US and are readily available, unless maybe you’re a 3rd grader looking for them at some school library that probably wasn’t going to order the book for kids anyway before it became “banned”

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tokaitoday at 1:13 PM

No non of them are censored in the EU. They are all censored in the US, maybe with the exception of Salman Rushdie.

US book banning is mainly schools and parent groups strong arming libraries and educators to forgo specific books.

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llm_nerdtoday at 1:28 PM

The "in Portugal" is, I presume, a statement on where the library is.

Further, when people talk about banned books, they usually mean at some sub-country level, even down to a school board. Like if you look at -

https://pen.org/banned-books-list-2025/

- these books weren't banned from the United States, but they're controversial enough that individual school boards or library systems removed them.