Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Banned Books Week 23 - 30 September

Google has set up a special page to "Celebrate Your Freedom to Read":
"To Kill a Mockingbird. Of Mice and Men. The Great Gatsby. 1984. It's hard to imagine a world without these extraordinary literary classics, but every year there are hundreds of attempts to remove great books from libraries and schools. In fact, according to the American Library Association, 42 of 100 books recognized by the Radcliffe Publishing Course as the best novels of the 20th century have been challenged or banned."
"Google Book Search is our effort to expand the universe of books you can discover, and this year we're joining libraries and bookstores across the country to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Banned Books Week – a nationwide initiative to help people learn about and explore banned books."

A welcome gesture on Google's part, but I do think that they should also have used the page to link in to the Google News Archive Search giving readers a path to contemporary press articles when many of the featured books were published:
Explore Banned Books:
http://books.google.com/googlebooks/banned/

Google News Archive search
http://news.google.com/archivesearch