this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ninja/post/49635

Book vendors selling to Texas public schools, ranging from national sellers like Amazon to local bookstores with eight employees, must now rate all the books they sell based on sexual content, according to new legislation signed into law on June 12.

If the book vendor fails to comply with state library standards that will be in place by January 1, 2024, they’d be barred from selling to Texas public schools.

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[–] Pepper 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Vendors will up the cost to cover additional labour, the books won't be in the school budget anymore and conservatives'll have got what they wanted

[–] gabereal451 7 points 1 year ago

I read this as targeting book sales (such as the Scholastic book sales) rather than texts or anything like that. This is ultimately going to kill the middle-grade book market in Texas.

Also, according to the article, publishers (like Penguin Random House) can be considered vendors too, as well as Amazon and large or small independent book sellers. Ultimately, it seems logical that a book's editor would be the one to rate the book (since the editor is the one that would be championing the book at the publishing house) and the rating would be copy-pasted by the sellers. However, it would be much easier (money-wise and lawsuit-wise) for publishers to just not sell their books in texas.

I swear, texas just gets worse and worse. Every week I think "there's no possible way those clowns in the texas state legislature can make their state any worse than it is" and every week they prove me wrong.

[–] Gumby 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Now California needs to make a law that any books that have a sexual content rating cannot be sold to public schools. Vendors can then choose between which state they want to sell.

[–] Rentlar 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This book is known in the state of California to be potentially cancerous.

[–] PostmodernPythia 2 points 1 year ago

Better to provide context than promote censorship.

[–] altima_neo@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Man I'm so worried for future generations of kids. I hope they can persevere through the hobbled addition system and find their way to an open education. Lest they be accepting of the dumbing down of everything.

[–] TechyDad 4 points 1 year ago

I'm proud of my son. He decided to read a book based on "it was banned in some school districts" (not ours). He then scoffed at the reason for the ban.

I can't recall the book title at the moment, but the reason was that two characters have sex and the incident takes up one page. From what my son described, it wasn't overly graphic. This wasn't an erotica sex scene tossed into the book. It was just the normal kind of story description of events. Books like the Bible have much more graphic content.