Sitting in a meeting with Penguin Random House CEO Nihar Malaviya in 2023, Dan Novack knew he had to make a choice. States across the country were passing laws intended to remove titles from school and library shelves—efforts that critics say selectively censored titles on such contested topics as racial history and gender identity. Many were published by Novack’s employer, PRH—the largest trade book publisher in the United States, which saw its sales top $5 billion last year.

Given that some of these laws stipulated that those who broke them could be slapped with criminal charges, Novack, VP and associate general counsel at PRH, foresaw a future in which the publisher was bombarded with high-risk lawsuits, frantically playing what he calls a “50-state defense.” Passivity, he realized, was not an option. Malaviya, as it turns out, was already on the same page.

Enter PRH’s Intellectual Freedom Taskforce, an internal group led by PRH SVP Skip Dye that has become the vanguard in the publishing industry’s fight against book bans. Since the task force’s inception, Dye has been widely recognized for its work, including in the pages of this magazine. Still, he is quick to point out that it’s a team effort—after all, it’s Novack and PRH head of policy Rosie Stewart who have taken book banners to court, advocated for freedom to read legislation that has since been passed, and paved the way for other publishers to join them.

The process has not been an easy one. Nevertheless, Dye believes that the work of the task force has boosted morale at PRH. “We set forth because we felt it was the right thing to do,” he says. “We recognized the fight wasn’t just about books, but about constitutional rights.”

Of all its efforts, the task force’s litigation has brought it the most attention—not least because PRH became the first American book publisher to sue a school district when it joined a 2023 lawsuit against Escambia County, Fla. Alongside PEN America, authors, and parents, PRH’s legal team quashed a policy that would have allowed the Escambia school board to remove any book it found objectionable from library shelves. (Novack characterizes the publisher’s win in the case as a “fortuitous” break.)

PRH’s subsequent lawsuits in Iowa and Florida—filed in November 2023 and August 2024, respectively—are ongoing, as is a more recent case in Idaho. The Iowa case has been particularly “circuitous,” Novack says; PRH and coplaintiffs including the Iowa State Educators Association have been moved between district and federal courts several times while the case argues that SF 496—which purports to protect children from “pornography”—violates the First Amendment.

Novack says this slow work is part of the normal, necessary process for establishing precedent and securing legal rights. For instance, SF 496 specifically bans books that “relate” to “gender identity” or “sexual orientation,” which PRH and its coplaintiffs argue is too vague and broadens the legal meaning of “explicit” material to the point of absurdity. Novack says such legal sleight of hand is a “common denominator” in book ban legislation—meaning that if PRH wins in Iowa, future lawsuits could be more easily won, if not prevented altogether.

Dye, Stewart, and Novack emphasize that even as the litigation endurance test unfolds, many breakthroughs have occurred offstage. Stewart has lobbied successfully for legislation writing the American Library Association’s “Library Bill of Rights” into state law, including a new Colorado law aimed at “shielding our public school libraries from D.C. culture wars,” per the legislature.

Stewart, who has a background in grassroots organizing, says that coalition building with state-level freedom to read groups and such industry organizations as Authors Against Book Bans has been monumental in getting PRH’s agenda on the radar of state legislatures. “What we’ve tried to do is not disrupt the coalition, but support those efforts,” Stewart says.

Dye has also prioritized amplifying the voices of educators and librarians as much as possible to combat the growing mistrust in their expertise. “The conduits, the most important connectors” for children and young adults “to see new worlds, are those library workers,” Dye says. Such bills as the one in Iowa, he adds, threaten the inclusivity and openness of the spaces librarians create to both hold up “mirrors” to readers and open “doorways” to new viewpoints.

Since 2023, PRH’s “Banned Wagon” initiative has taken the publisher’s bookmobile on a tour across the country each Banned Books Week, offering communities PRH titles that have been deemed obscene and banned in some states. (This year’s tour kicks off October 5, and will see the Wagon visit libraries and bookstores across Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia.) On one of those tours, Dye saw firsthand the difference a single book can make in someone’s mindset.

Dye recalls a person in Iowa who went from supporting book bans to being skeptical of them after she spent just 90 minutes reading Malinda Lo’s Last Night at the Telegraph Club. “They came up to me after and said, ‘This book is really good. I don’t get it,’  ” Dye says, smiling.

With this in mind, Dye says it’s important “not to dwell” on such setbacks as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit’s stunning May 23 ruling in Little v. Llano County that books on library shelves represent “government speech”—an argument Novack says “defies common sense.” Novack pointed to the argument underpinning Mahmoud v. Taylor, which allows parents to “opt-out” their children from seeing things that conflict with their religion in public schools, as similarly absurd. “That right had not ever been recognized previously,” he says.

Simultaneously, and despite these setbacks, Novack sees PRH developing a much stronger line of argument rooted in constitutional precedent. In August, in PRH v. Gibson, the Florida court struck down a state ban on “sexual content” in public school libraries, determining it was “overbroad” based on previous similar cases, including PRH’s litigation in Iowa. “The Llano ideology and the argument that we’re building in our cases are on a collision course,” Novack says, “and we are doing everything we can to see to it that reason and justice win out.”

In the meantime, Dye and Stewart plan to keep chipping away on the legislative and cultural fronts. “We need to instill the right to read in language in as many states as possible,” Dye says. “We want to make sure we codify the definition of ‘obscenity,’ ” ensuring that it applies evenly to schools and libraries nationwide for the longterm.

Novack sees the amplification of the voices of such students as Haley Bonds, a high schooler who volunteered as a plaintiff in the Iowa case, as key to this effort. Students are the constituency that is most intimately affected by book bans and yet perhaps the least often listened to, he says; “If we can give Haley Bonds and people like her more resources and a bigger megaphone, it’ll do so much to accelerate the defeat of this censorship movement.”

Though other publishers have joined PRH’s efforts on several cases—most notably in Florida, where the Big Five have all signed on as plaintiffs—PRH is still by far the industry leader in the fight for the freedom to read, although Dye hopes that other publishers will keep devoting more and more resources to the fight alongside them. He encourages people to think back to the McCarthy era, when publishing banded together against censorship, albeit of a different kind. “This is about all of us together, channeling our collective energy toward a goal to make sure that our authors’ voices are being heard,” Dye says, “and our responsibility to bring readers the books that they want to read.”

Dye adds that it isn’t as strange as it looks for a for-profit company to be taking the lead on a public interest issue like this one; it’s a simple matter of making sure the world is one where publishers can continue to do business on their own terms. “We’re adding to the marketplace of ideas,” he says. “And when all of a sudden the marketplace is being hampered, that’s a problem.”

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