BookNet Canada Reports on “Borrowing Banned Books in Canada
From a BookNet Canada Blog Post:
In this blog series, we’re identifying books that are banned or controversial using the keywords that book publishers include in their ONIX book metadata. Like we explored in the first blog post in this series, there are nearly 2,000 ISBNs and 614 unique titles or book series that are identified as banned or challenged in their metadata keywords.
From this list, we identified the top 10 individual books and top 10 book series:
Individual titles
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ulysses by James Joyce
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood 🍁
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
Animal Farm by George Orwell
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Series titles
House of Night series by P. C. Cast and Kristin Cast
The Sandman series by Neil Gaiman
A Wrinkle in Time series by Madeleine L’Engle
Jasmine Toguchi series by Debbi Michiko Florence
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series by Alvin Schwartz
Cilla Lee-Jenkins series by Susan Tan
Aristotle and Dante series by Benjamin Alire Saenz
The Chronicles of Narnia series by C. S. Lewis
Maus series by Art Spiegelman
The Luck Uglies series by Paul Durham
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Altogether, loans of these banned books steadily increased 690% from July 2020 to June 2023, with the largest peaks from March 6-March 12, 2023 and April 17-April 23, 2023.
The total circulation of library loans in these Canadian libraries also increased steadily — 786% over this period. This can be for a number of reasons, but most likely due to the continued increasing number of Canadian libraries that report to LibraryData!
Filed under: Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Libraries, News, Reports

About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.