For many, sifting through piles of books is proving cumbersome. In fact, all campus libraries in Fort Worth ISD recently closed to conduct an extensive review of materials in light of House Bill 900.
Now, about two months after Gov. Greg Abbott signed the so-called READER Act into law, one Dallas company is poised to fill a growing need among Texas districts.
BookmarkED announced its official Lone Star launch earlier this week. Billed as an “industry-first technology solution,” it lets parents approve the books their kids can read while helping school districts check their compliance with HB 900.
“We need to reduce the liability that school districts have so they're not working in fear, and they can run their libraries like they need to be run: for literacy,” said Steve Wandler, BookmarkED’s CEO and co-founder.
Wandler said that libraries currently rely on the previous year’s data, but BookmarkED can provide a real-time glimpse of today’s challenged books. He thinks it will come in handy for districts, given that “it's impossible” for librarians to know all the contents of each and every title in their inventory. Officials will be able to learn why and when a certain novel was challenged and whether it’s been taken off shelves, among other capabilities.
This comes at a time of mounting book bans in Texas and in other states. Book challenges have skyrocketed in recent years, particularly for titles touching on race, gender or sexuality.
Roughly 1,270 demands were made to censor library materials last year, according to the American Library Association. That’s nearly double the 729 challenges logged in 2021.
A coalition of publishers and booksellers has sued over HB 900, with vendors blasting it as a gateway to “censorship.” Some warn that the law, which requires sellers to rate novels’ appropriateness, will work to curb free speech in schools and hurt small businesses.
“We want to focus on literacy.” – Steve Wandler, BookmarkED CEO and co-founder
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Yet the READER Act’s advocates argue that it will keep inappropriate material out of the hands of kids.
BookmarkED hopes to help parents and school districts alike.
“BookmarkED’s technology addresses the current state of challenged books by fostering parental choice to decide what books their children have access to, based on their family’s values and interests,” the company noted in a press release.
Christin Bentley, state Republican executive committeewoman for Senate District 1, recently launched a “Protect Childhood” Substack that hosts a list of more than 400 novels, according to the website Book Riot. The list includes expected titles, such as the controversial graphic memoir Gender Queer, in addition to literary classics like Slaughterhouse-Five and a collection of poems by Allen Ginsberg.
Wandler described his product as an “antivirus for libraries.” It will instantly let schools know whether they have books in their catalog that have been restricted or banned in the past.
That way, school employees can get back to teaching and students can get back to reading.
“We're not about challenged and banned books. That's not what we're about,” Wandler said. “We don't even want to focus on that. We want to focus on literacy.”
