The Book Ban Map is a free, non-partisan tool that turns national data on school book bans into something you can see, explore, and understand — state by state, county by county.
Book bans are easy to read about and hard to picture. A number in a report doesn’t tell you where removals are concentrated, how one state compares to another, or how close the issue is to home. The Book Ban Map exists to close that gap: it takes the PEN America Index of School Book Bans and renders it as an interactive map, paired with an AI assistant that can answer plain-language questions about what the data shows.
The goal is civic understanding, not persuasion. BBM doesn’t tell you what to think about book bans — it shows you what is being recorded, cites where the numbers come from, and lets you draw your own conclusions.
A book ban, as tracked here, is an instance in which a book is removed or restricted from student access in a school or school library following a challenge — a formal objection to its content. Challenges come from a range of directions and are debated on real and competing grounds.
Supporters of removals often frame them around parental rights and keeping certain material age-appropriate. Opponents often frame them as censorship that narrows students’ access to diverse ideas and perspectives. Both arguments are part of an ongoing national conversation, and reasonable people land in different places. BBM’s job is to make the underlying facts of that conversation legible, not to settle it.
State-level figures come from the PEN America Index of School Book Bans, a widely-cited national dataset. Additional population and geographic reference data is drawn from World Population Review. BBM credits these sources directly and does not alter their numbers.
The Book Ban Map began as a schoolwide passion-project deliverable and has since reached several thousand visitors. It has been used as a teaching and reference tool in several schools across New York City — a way for students to engage with a live civic issue using real data rather than headlines alone.
BBM is an educational tool and does not collect donations itself. The most direct way to support the work of tracking book bans and defending the freedom to read is to give to the organizations already doing it — including the one whose data makes this map possible.
The Book Ban Map was built by Georges Levy, a New York City high school student and competitive debater with a focus on civic education and public service. The project grew out of a simple conviction from years in debate: that access to ideas — and the freedom to encounter, question, and argue with them — is foundational to how young people learn to think. BBM is an attempt to make one part of that conversation visible to anyone who wants to understand it.
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