School districts in Texas are working to comply with a new state law that bans what the law calls “indecent” and “profane” books from libraries on campus. A North Texas startup is offering a solution.
The company is called Bookmarked, and it has pitched itself as an antivirus for libraries, offering to flag potentially problematic material from thousands of titles.
Bayliss Wagner, who covers politics for the San Antonio Express-News and the Hearst newspapers, said the Republicans who authored this bill said it protects students from books they consider harmful.
“’Indecent’ or ‘profane,’ those two terms are defined in the law. ‘Profane’ has to do with the kind of language that is used, and ‘indecent’ has to do with the way that nudity and body parts and other kinds of interactions are portrayed in books,” Wagner said. “In every case, how these laws work is that school boards or school districts must interpret them. So they must apply them to their own books, and that leaves room for interpretation in every case.”
Bookmarked says it will help schools identify any books that could cause schools a problem, but it doesn’t tell schools which titles to ban from their libraries.
“It scans their libraries and compares it to online data that it’s collected using its AI engine that tracks which books have been banned or challenged in other districts or in other states,” she said. “It’ll say, ‘Oh, this book was banned elsewhere, just so you know.’ And then the school is allowed to make its own choice.”
However, in some cases, there are huge numbers of books that are flagged, Wagner said.
“For example, in New Braunfels ISD, they were in the news recently because they closed their libraries for several weeks while they reviewed books for compliance with SB 13,” she said. “They then revealed that about 450 books are now in review. These include everything from ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ to ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ both of which are in AP literature curricula.”
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Wagner said Bookmarked has made at least $130,000 in contracts across the state.
“For example, Killeen ISD, I think they’re spending about $40,000 on this for this year,” she said. “Some districts are getting the program for free in exchange for providing feedback. Other smaller districts like Llano ISD in the Austin area are spending about $3,000 this year. Generally, it’s about between 25 cents and $2 per student for access to the software.”
Wagner said some school librarians are happy with Bookmarked’s services.
“I talked to a librarian in a rural district in North Texas who said she likes the scanning features,” Wagner said. “She thinks that they’re helpful for helping her reassign books. Say a book is in the kids section, but it should be in the high school section or something like that. But that in general, she doesn’t use it to restrict books entirely or to take them out of the library.”
However, other librarians and some parents question whether this system is necessary for schools to spend money on.
“I talked to parents who just felt like this wasn’t useful at all,” Wagner said. “We obtained open records where librarians were saying this product did nothing that it said it was going to do effectively. It was a failure.”
Leila Little, a parent in Llano ISD who is the lead plaintiff in a major legal case over library book censorship, said she felt the program was redundant to how her kids’ school library already operated.
“It allows parents to go through and say, ‘I don’t want my kid to be allowed to check out any of the books on a list.’ So they can say, ‘I don’t want them to check out X book, Y book, Z book,’ an unlimited number of books,” Wagner said.
“She said librarians already allowed parents to do that. And in most districts this is true. What I found is that in the eight districts that I got comprehensive data on the usage of this software from, none of them had more than 0.04% of parents using those features. Most parents didn’t even get accounts. And then a lot of them had no interest in restricting certain titles, which really tells you that this may be an issue that’s much more pertinent to politicians than to the average parent.”
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