Banned Books or Merely “Unavaialable”?

Most people have not heard of Princes of the Yen. It is little wonder. The book is not banned. If it had been banned, everyone would have heard of it. Dr. Richard Werner is a professor of Finance and Banking with a degree from the University of Oxford. He is not a quack or a fly-by-night charlatan. In his book, he identifies the key figures behind Japan’s central bank and how they have used finance to control the economy and therefore the nation. The difficulty is, he uses this historic and financial study to look at the broader global stage. In short, he says some things about the United States financial system that make the book “unpublish-able” in the United States. No major publisher or distributor will touch it. Which means that we cannot order it. Even if you try to buy it on Amazon, you can plan on paying $200 for a paperback. The large online sellers do not even provide an ebook.

Granted, it is a book on economics. It is likely not going to replace A Court of Thorns and Roses as a best-seller, but the fact that reading it is not really even an option casts a shadow on what we would suppose to be “freedom of speech.” Large internet retailers and publishers can (and do) decide what book you can access.

So while we celebrate banned books week, we should recognize that “banning” frequently functions as a catalyst to interest and sale of the banned book. Even though bans diminish circulation through public institutions like libraries, the ban simultaneously drives sales (and sometimes prices) upward.

We should likely be more concerned when good books cannot find publishers, when they are permanently “out of print” or are suddenly plagued with a host of printing or distribution struggles. We can know with relative certainty that this is how the UK “discouraged” the sale of The Anarchist’s Cookbook which has also become “unavailable” from our distributor recently.

As we celebrate Banned Books Week, do pick up a banned book and find out for yourself why it was deemed dangerous, but for every one of these you can assume there is one more that was deemed “too great a risk” by big retailers, publishers, and distributors.