https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/10/16/the-book-burners-have-taken-over-the-publishing-house/
In the mid-2010s, people began to notice something strange happening on college campuses. In the past, wealthy donors tried to censor professors and students. But then the demands started coming from the students themselves. More interestingly, the demands were being expressed in the language of public safety. It was ‘dangerous’ for Bret Weinstein, a professor who criticised the tactics of an anti-racist protest, to teach at Evergreen State College. It was ‘harmful’ for Erika Christakis, a professor who questioned the wisdom of banning certain types of Halloween costumes, to retain her position at Yale University. It was ‘violence’ for Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, to give a talk at Middlebury College. The Great Awokening, as it would later come to be called, had transformed America’s colleges.
Something similar has been happening inside America’s publishers. One vice-president at a Big Five publisher, who did not want to be identified in this piece, told me that there have been ‘more changes in the past five years than the previous 20 to 25’. The changes have been fuelled by the rise of Bookstagram, BookTok and Twitterature (a portmanteau of Twitter and literature) – and, of course, by the Great Awokening. Today, anyone with an internet connection can accuse a book of racism, sexism or transphobia. Across the board, American publishers have reshaped their editing policies in response to social-media outrage.
Sensitivity readers, individuals who are hired to eradicate potentially offensive material from books, were largely unknown until 2016, the same year young adult (YA) author Justina Ireland built a database of sensitivity readers. Uncoincidentally, this was the same year Donald Trump was elected to the Oval Office. In less than a decade, sensitivity readers have become a routine part of the editing process. Whether it’s picture books or adult novels, and even the pages of Science magazine, the most extreme people on the ‘progressive’ left now have an important, and frankly unprecedented, role inside American publishers. Indeed, Ireland and other sensitivity readers’ attacks actually fuel the demand for their services.
‘We’re now using sensitivity readers a great deal’, one president at a Big Five publisher explained to me:
‘The sensitivity readers that we’re employing are at the very, very, very farthest edges of the cultural police. They are over vigilant to a large degree. It’s great to have the most extreme possible reaction to a book, which catches even the most apparently neutral points and casts a severe light on them.’
As a vice-president at a different major publisher put it to me:
‘We are very interested in trying to suss out what books might cause a problem on social media, which can come back in our faces in terms of sales. Nobody wants to publish a book that social media is going to cancel. It’s unpleasant, it can be hurtful, it’s upsetting and it’s not good for business.’
While publishers are focussed on their bottom line, many literary agents are more focussed on protecting their authors from edits. If you can imagine a National Book Award winner edited against their will by a 22-year-old sensitivity reader, who just graduated from a gender-studies programme at Yale, then you can imagine the frustration of the agents I talked to, many of whom have been selling books to the Big Five for decades.
