Hello, I'm Dana Taylor, and this is a special episode of USA Today's The Excerpt.

This is Band Books Week. It's a week that highlights how a few loud voices have shaped what kinds of books are pulled from schools and library shelves.

Who gets the final word, not on which books should be read, but on access.

And what's been the impact on those caught in a fight they didn't start, our teachers,

and librarians.

Here discuss the banning of books as USA Today Books reporter Claire Mulroy.

Thanks for joining me, Claire.

Thanks for having me.

I want to start out by asking you to give me a little background on banned books week.

How did this tradition get started? So Band Books Week

launched in 1982 as a response to a sudden urge of challenges in libraries, bookstores, schools.

In the words of the American Library Association, it's an effort to draw national attention

to the harms of censorship. So you'll see readers and librarians sharing their favorite

band books during this

week. And here at USA Today, we're publishing a story every single day about this landscape, what it

looks like and how it's impacting readers. Let's break it down, starting with what it means to ban a book

in the first place. Yeah. So these definitions are super important, but they kind of differ depending on who you ask.

The ALA, who is a founding member of the Band Books Week Coalition, defines a book challenge

as any attempt to remove or restrict materials and a band as the actual removal.

But Penn America, one of the week's sponsors, defines it as any action taken against a title

based on its content. I spoke to

Pen America's freedom to read director and she told me that the key point here is access. So if a book

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