Censorship Royale—’Sensitivity Readers’ Came for James Bond, and They’re Not Stopping There

EXCERPT

The James Bond novels and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory aren’t usually paired in the same sentence, but they have this in common: they have both fallen prey to “sensitivity readers.” While this development is lamentable, it serves as a warning for how quickly book censorship can spin out of control.

The Guardian published a story last week about sensitivity readers who comb through old and new books, searching for content that might be “offensive” to modern eyes that publishers or writers can then censor. This includes content like that written in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and other stories by Roald Dahl, which Puffin Books, the publisher of these stories, decided to edit after consulting sensitivity readers.

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If we don’t stop this book scrubbing now, we could very soon fall into a future where beloved classics are constantly re-edited until all flavor has been boiled out of them.

Elad Vaida is a staff writer for Common Sense Society.

Originally published in Daily Caller.