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Book Bans Are Surging in an Increasingly Digital Age

Why children reading scares a lot of people

Ira Wells is a writer whose most recent book, On Book Banning: Or, How the New Censorship Consensus Trivializes Art and Undermines Democracy, was a finalist for the 2026 Writers’ Trust Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. I spoke to Ira about the sense of cultural fear and helplessness that seems to be behind the resurgence of book banning and about how his book was inspired not by a conservative drive to ban books but by a so-called library audit at a school in the heart of progressive Toronto.

Right now, we’re under the potential threat of a nuclear war. Cases of measles are rising, and book banning has become more and more of a mainstream thing. It doesn’t feel like the 2026 that we were anticipating. What is it about book banning, specifically, that this idea that we used to regard as a symbol of backward thinking has become so popular again?

I couldn’t help but notice that in that litany of apocalyptic factors, you didn’t mention artificial intelligence, but we might just throw that in there too. I saw an interesting chart the other day that sketched out three different trajectories that AI might take. One was that it would eliminate X number of jobs and that this would, going even further, eliminate humanity. The other trajectory was that it would increase productivity and bring us to some sort of technological Eden. And then the third trajectory was that it might increase productivity by 0.02 percent. In other words, we might end up in some sort of utopia, we might just all die, or things could get fractionally better than they are now. All that seems to be in play right now. That’s part of the feeling of uneasiness and uncertainty—of feeling that there really isn’t a ground beneath our feet right now. And I think that sense of distrust and loss of control is maybe beneath a lot of the factors you mentioned.

Certainly, with book banning, there is a kind of desire for control that I see in many of the initiatives. If you look at what’s happening in Alberta, there are a lot of people who are upset by what they see as child porn, or they sometimes call it LGBTQ indoctrination, that is on the shelves of libraries. In fact, the internet and cellphones—which is really where kids spend most of their time these days—are a far greater source of sexually explicit material. I think they get that. But it all just feels so ephemeral. Like, where do you go to protest that? Where do you wave your flag? It’s in your feed one second; it’s off your feed the next. It all just feels so uncontrollable.

I think the library feels like a place where you can do something concrete. You can go to an actual library; you can pull books off the shelves. And I think maybe that’s behind this strange resurgence of book banning.

We’re both authors, and we both love books. Neither of us would agree that any one book could have the same immediate influence—progressive or toxic—as a fifteen-second TikTok video watched by 16 million people in a day. So, it’s kind of grabbing at the thing that’s nearby, that can be controlled.

I do think that the accumulation of views does represent something quite insidious. When you look at the reach that those TikTok videos can have, it is shocking compared to how many people will read. At the same time, you and I both probably also want to think that there’s something special about reading and that books can impact your life in a really concrete way. You can read a paragraph and never forget it. You can read a line, and it’ll change your life. But I think it’s absurd to say that a book could, you know, turn your kid gay or whatever the book banners believe. I think that’s ridiculous.

It’s funny, because I will sometimes interview authors who are primarily freelance writers for magazines. They write a lot of magazine articles that will be read by potentially tens of thousands of people. But then they write a book, and in the Canadian context, they’re lucky if it’s read by 5,000 people, and yet they feel very differently about the book. There’s something concrete and........

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