Drained-pool Politics Versus Digital Libraries in U.S. Cyberspace

Though the capability to ban one book exists as it does in the physical world, access to digital libraries has become all-or-nothing in many instances around the nation. States, municipalities, nor school districts are united on the issue with federal law applying only on a case-by-case basis. Call it switch flipping or drained-pool politics: just don’t call it right. A refusal to share digital shelf space should not result in the eradication of digital libraries. Intellectual freedom is wrapped up in a possessive kind of love for libraries with the cost being the loss of millions of books in cyberspace. In the United States of America, the land of the free, a nation-wide balancing act is taking place that makes the horror of Fahrenheit 451 seem more like a documentary on our already eerily futuristic world.