Hey John

For the first time ever, a massively intersectional coalition of civil rights, LGBTQ+, anti-surveillance, anti-book ban, racial justice, reproductive justice, immigration, labor, and antimonopoly nonprofits are calling for federal action on digital book bans & reader surveillance.¹ Will you join us?

Take Action

We used to take for granted reading without being surveilled, knowing what we’re reading is what the author wrote, and trusting that our books won’t disappear. These rights parallel a long history of battles to protect the right to read anonymously² as well as to resist censorship³ and combat exclusion⁴ in publishing. With 3 of 10 people in the US now reading digital books, these battles have entered a new, much more opaque playing field.

Basically, for Big Tech and Big Publishers, data on readers is becoming the product even more than the books themselves. A recent (totally infuriating) report details the reader-to-data-broker pipeline⁵ that the world’s largest publisher, Elsevier, has quietly established for students and any reader of their digital publications.

Concerningly, Elsevier tracks more than what books someone reads—its terms of service let it surveil readers’ search and browsing history across the whole web, collect their locations, and build profiles based on inferences from this data.⁵ Such wholesale exposure of readers’ intimate personal data could have life-altering implications when data brokers sell it to law enforcement, vigilantes, hackers, stalkers, potential employers, or landlords. Sadly, we don’t know how often Overdrive and their Libby app or Hoopla do the same because tech companies often force public libraries to sign NDAs.

Reading a digital book should never result in threats to our safety and future. That’s why we need Congress to launch an investigation into these awful practices. Will you take a moment contact your representatives and ask them to investigate?

Contact your reps now!

Thanks so much for sticking up for readers’ rights in these wild times. Wishing you some lovely, surveillance-free stories this December!

Lia at ❤️Fight

PS: We made a video from our protest at the Internet Archive this year. Check it out if you get a moment!

Footnotes:

1. Battle for Libraries https://www.battleforlibraries.com/congress

2. Slate https://slate.com/technology/2015/06/usa-freedom-act-before-snowden-librarians-were-the-anti-surveillance-heroes.html

3. Publisher's Weekly https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/soapbox/article/88195-harvey-j-graff-examines-the-history-of-book-banning.html

4. PEN America https://pen.org/report/race-equity-and-book-publishing/

5. SPARC https://sparcopen.org/news/2023/sparc-report-urges-action-to-address-concerns-with-sciencedirect-data-privacy-practices/