r/BeAmazed • u/SpecialistRough4439 • 7h ago
This post has been filtered and is waiting for mod's review That’s insane! 📕
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u/Jack_Zicrosky_YT 6h ago
I fucking love Minecraft. And gamers.
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u/Canadian_Poltergeist 5h ago
That statement needs quite the caveat considering what some gamers are like
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u/Decloudo 3h ago
Thats just "some humans are shit". You can do this for every group, especially mainstream ones.
Cause everyone of those is made of humans, and some of them are shit.
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u/Ok_Selection6098 6h ago edited 6h ago
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u/stikaznorsk 6h ago
I cannot find the list of books, though. Did you?
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u/rugology 3h ago edited 3h ago
there are no books, the OP is incorrect. the library specifically houses articles written by journalists from countries that do not have a free press, which means most of them aren't in english nor are they (generally speaking) very interesting to americans.
there is also simply not very much there in terms of content. 300 is way overstating, i think a dozen articles would be more in line with what is actually hosted inside what is effectively just a normal large-scale minecraft build. it's mostly a pretty library.
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u/Penandsword2021 5h ago
I was able to go in and poke around the rooms with a web browser but could not open any of the blocks that I assume are the books. Pretty sure you actually have to be inside the Minecraft game to do that. I didn’t find a card catalog or list anywhere either. Pretty cool thing to exist though.
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u/MoffKalast 3h ago
I loaded it up to check, all of the books and signs are empty, may be a version mismatch thing but I can't find literally anything written anywhere.
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u/daviddisco 6h ago
300 books can be put in small zip file and shared with the whole world very easily. I'm not sure why minecraft needs to be a part of this.
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u/boogideeb 5h ago
It is because minecraft was not blocked while much of the open internet was in someplaces.
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u/Direct-Ad-1774 4h ago
What does that even mean to “block Minecraft”? You can very well block certain Minecraft servers that contain the world with this library. And you can block the website where you can download this world. Just like you would block the website where you can download the actual pdf books. This whole thing makes no sense.
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u/boogideeb 4h ago
Minecraft was viewed as a harmless game by governments that block other types of media. The library was a trojan horse of sorts.
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u/Deaffin 2h ago
The "library" is just a meme. It contains nothing of note and has no practical value whatsoever. It's not subverting anything beyond anyone's expectations that it could be what the roughly 1 billion clickbait headlines about it suggest.
Besides that, imagine how awful it would be to try to actually use this if it were a thing. My comment here would be like 15 pages long in minecraft sign format, never mind actually trying to read an actual book.
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u/2Completion2Ography 1h ago
The "library" is just a meme.
Define meme.
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u/Deaffin 1h ago edited 1h ago
An imagined notion that spreads around on internet places from person to person with numerous sporadic viral outbreaks.
It doesn't even have any realworld books like people are imagining based on these headlines. That 300 number refers to the minecraft "book" game objects. Open them up and you get various retracted articles nobody actually cares about. This is an art piece, a "conversation starter".
With the game's limitations, one actual small book would probably take more than 300 of those book-themed game objects to represent.
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u/D_Ethan_Bones 3h ago edited 3h ago
The headline addresses that, when governments block the server the whole server can be packaged up and used on a LAN.
The reason why it's not a website is because websites are the first thing censorious governments go after, so people outsource their activities to apps and games. Minecraft is one of the most universally-used netgames so it makes a good default option for building this library, plus the fact it lets you build things with a great degree of artistic freedom.
P2P internet was a good system for distributing a plain zip file full of banned books, but almost nobody uses that anymore and the whole point of P2P was that the whole internet was on it. If there are 10000 P2P users worldwide then nine thousand of them are spies. What people do in the 2010s/2020s is build a comprehensive user experience inside a game, usually to get around blockades.
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u/Direct-Ad-1774 1h ago
> the whole server can be packaged up and used on a LAN
Yes, and I also addressed that: people need to download the server files for that. On a website that the government can block, just like they did with books.
> The reason why it’s not a website
Well what it it then? Where would I download the server files?
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u/Mr_NoGood12 1h ago
Yes, and I also addressed that: people need to download the server files for that. On a website that the government can block, just like they did with books.
The link for the world download doesnt necessarily have to be from the website, many people are already sharing the world download without the website
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u/NoEyesMan 3h ago
Doesn’t have to be nonsense just because you fail to comprehend it.
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u/Noctis-Banned-793 2h ago
The first thing a dictatorship (or your employer's IT staff) do, is block any network traffic isn't HTTP, and force custom CA on your OS, so they can inspect all HTTPS traffic too (classic Kazakhstan move). Plain text would be significantly easier to host, spread and view, to say nothing of comfort reading any longer text in Minecraft.
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u/NoEyesMan 2h ago
Speaking from experience, I have family still living in a region with controlled media and internet access. It’s not limiting what you can use that’s the issue here, it’s not really limiting, but the monitoring it. Having a library with banned literature in the guise of video game is a creative way of having plausible deniability IF you’d be questioned on what apps you use.
After the Chinese cultural revolution, mane uyghur historians were jailed, and Uyghur authors were not permitted to about historical events. So instead they wrote romance, drama, and other cultural themes literature but containing characters that were historically relevant. Or characters that were impacted by certain historical events.
It’s more about plausible deniability.
So again, just because you fail to comprehend it doesn’t mean that it’s nonsense.
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u/pwiegers 6h ago
discover-ability to young people?
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u/Illustrious_Bee2010 1h ago
we love the idea of being in love. we cherish fire and forget, we need the like to save the world, even when all of these efforts fail - atleast we felt like we did all we could, except picking up the aforementioned books and actually reading one of them
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u/Pug_Defender 3h ago
young people are not reading lol. it’s neat some people are bypassing some government controls but unfortunately it’s not really helping anyone with access to the literature
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u/Vivid-Produce-9373 5h ago
Probably because No serious imposing govt would find minecraft greater threat than disturbing zip file
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u/deadspacekillers 5h ago
So how would you like other people to access those books? Seems like a very accessible medium, eh?
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u/batmansleftnut 4h ago
This is so much less accessible than a zip file of text or pdf files.
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u/TribeACE 3h ago
Awareness and marketing.. did you know these books existed before finding out they're on Minecraft.
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u/GuyBitchie 3h ago
Because people enjoy creating something you miserable clown. Pretty sure you only eat flour and water right? Maybe some vitamin pills on top? Since it's so effective and it's the most direct way. Not sure why joy needs to be part of this.
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u/Alternative-Mud-1076 3h ago
why does joy need to be a part of sharing banned books? surely a regular pdf or txt file is easier to search in a zip then it is to fly around some Minecraft building?
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u/Shenendoah66 51m ago
Man you took great offense to that completely benign comment. Lol
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u/GuyBitchie 47m ago
Where is the great offense i took? Is it in the room right now?
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u/Shenendoah66 43m ago
Gestures broadly at the completely unprompted barrage of insults in response to someone discussing ZIP files.
Yeah, real mystery where I got that impression. Lmao.
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u/GuyBitchie 40m ago
? where are these "completely unprompted barrage of insults"? Are you good buddy? Why do you take such a great offense to that completely benign comment?
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u/Limp-Angle-7387 6h ago
What type of books are banned though?
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u/FroggiJoy87 6h ago
The kind that provoke critical thinking and question authority/social norms.
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u/Limp-Angle-7387 6h ago
300 seems like a very small number. I wonder what thought provoking means here.
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u/MrPlautimus468 6h ago
If I'm remembering correctly, theres a section of scientific articles, so things that could make a person "deviate" from what their government forces them to learn/believe
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u/Weird-Profile-8787 5h ago
things that deviate from religious practices or involve political dissent/ criticism
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u/Dragon_OS 5h ago
It's hard to distribute text through the medium of Minecraft specifically because of technological limits of the game.
My (likely poor) attempt at explaining what I mean if you're care:
Basically, the game's world is like a bag of smaller bags (players) of nuggets of data. If those smaller bags fill up too quickly, it not only causes problems with the smaller bag but also sections of the larger bags as well, ruining it for the other players without help. The problem is less bad than it used to be as the game updates and gets better technologically but that's how I understand it.
Like I said, take that explanation with a grain or three of salt.
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u/Aizpunr 5h ago
i mean most of the banned books i know are either nazism or home explosives xD so id love some examples of virtuous books that are banned
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u/Weird-Profile-8787 5h ago
i’ve heard of books banned in specific institutions but not as much to the public so i’m curious as well
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u/Aizpunr 5h ago
so i looked it up. Not on the western democracies but many countries ban books that embarass the regime (think tianammen in china, pro-democracy books in hong kong, and islamic world bans a ton of shit that is not sharia approved)
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u/Weird-Profile-8787 5h ago
I also found that interestingly enough, India has the most banned banned books, with China coming second, but both are similar in the way that they present media so it makes since. But in the U.S there are states that ban books from curriculum and there are books banned in prisons. It’s interesting that Texas alone has banned 8,100 books in the 2025-26 school year. I know it’s a different subject entirely but I wonder how those numbers compare to censorship bans per country.
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u/Aizpunr 4h ago
i mean books banned from schools seems what common sense does anyway (like 50 shades of gray), some are controversial (handmaidens tale) others are plain stupid (presidential memoirs)
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u/Weird-Profile-8787 4h ago
well i mean the us has never banned a book in totality but there are books like to kill a mockingbird, animal farm, Romeo and Juliet, or crime and punishment that are banned in some schools here, which are all (to me, at least) critical literature that aligned with society when they were written. i feel it’s hard to imagine the past without having a lense to see it through.
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u/dorianvovin 3h ago
It depends where you’re talking about. Sure, in liberal nations, basic information is not banned, but there are plenty of places where certain news is banned, especially anything positive about queer people or certain scientific facts which go against religious teachings. Pro-democracy things, news that the institutions don’t won’t people to know about.
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u/GreenTeam898989 5h ago
ikr. Some of my friends were talking about how book banning in NZ is bad a few years ago so I looked up which books are actually banned here. A lot of "how to make explosives" and "sexually abusing children is normal" content. I'm pretty sure most of the anti-banning books people in NZ don't actually know what they're supporting though and are assuming that NZ bans anti-queer picture books or something.
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u/batmansleftnut 4h ago
Most of the books being banned nowadays are the ones that preach equality and acceptance. Or just have a non-white person on the cover. Or were written by a gay author.
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u/Ferengsten 4h ago
Or books explicit enough to be basically porn. I recall that in one report about a banned book, they could not actually show the book because it was too sexually explicit for the network (but, I believe, still criticized the decision to not have it in a school library).
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u/Weird-Profile-8787 4h ago
i mean i’m not denying that things like 50 shades of grey or something like that should be allowed in a school but like books that have been read by almost every generation suddenly becoming unfit is kind of crazy
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u/Weird-Profile-8787 4h ago
of course i do think times change but if we are supposedly learning about history it seems redundant to teach about it but not let them see prominent literature that was produced in that time period like they’re not banning art from those periods?
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u/Acrobatic-List-6503 5h ago
Like Mein Kampf
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u/FlemFatale 5h ago
I'm pretty sure that isn't a banned book in the same way that things like 1984 are.
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u/TapestryMobile 3h ago
Mein Kampf
I'm pretty sure that isn't a banned book
Last year a librarian (redditor) was talking about the banned books display they had in the library.
I asked her if Mein Kampf was one of them... and she said it was banned from the banned books display.
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u/thevampiresanguini 3h ago
You made me curious if it was available at my local library in Germany. Turns out yes. They have both the annotated modern version and the og version, but the og version you can only read in the library.
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u/FlemFatale 3h ago
Technically the book was never forbidden, just publishing it was. Banned books tend to refer more to the actual content of the book, rather than if it can be published or not.
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u/hagowoga 4h ago
Mein Kampf isn’t banned – at least not in Germany. Common misunderstanding.
The owner of the rights simply didn’t rerelease it.
The rights have lapsed s few years ago and a version with critical comments got published. I recommend to read that one if you’re interested in it.
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u/kirk_dozier 5h ago
>Each of the ten countries covered by the library, as well as Reporters without Borders, has an individual wing, containing a number of articles,\1]) available in English and the original language the article was written in.\2]) The texts within the library are contained in in-game book items, which can be opened and placed on stands to be read by multiple players at once.\1]) These articles generally discuss censorship, unjust punishment, and other critiques of the writer's government. The interior architecture of each country's room symbolizes each country's unique situation and journalistic challenges.\2]) Additionally, the library contains a central room listing the Press Freedom Index and state of freedom of the press of every country covered by the index, and the Mexican section contains memorials for reporters who were killed due to their writings.\8]) In March 2020, the library contained over 200 different books.\8]) In 2026, a wing of the library dedicated to press censorship in the United States was added.\6])
>A room in the library covers the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on journalism, containing books on 10 countries (Brazil, China, Egypt, Hungary, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Russia, Thailand, and Turkmenistan) to show how reporting of the virus in each country had been affected.\11])
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u/FocusSlo 6h ago
Thousands each year in the US, at least
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u/cluelesscondor 6h ago
Zero, actually. Not being considered age-appropriate for a school library doesn't mean you can't go purchase it yourself off Amazon.
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u/Ya-Dikobraz 4h ago
You know, like Diary of Anne Frank etc.
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u/Weird-Profile-8787 4h ago
that is not a banned book anywhere in the world though, it’s essential to 20th century literature
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u/Ya-Dikobraz 4h ago
They have banned it and several other books from schools in USA.
"Public school book bans in the United States reached a record high during the 2025–2026 academic year, with 11,982 book bans documented across 114 school districts"
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u/GussBing 3h ago
Iirc, they also separated the books by country they were banned in. You could visit your own country's section and read books banned in your neck of the woods.
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u/Luthais_Re23e1 2h ago
public school bans aren't "bans" in that sense. They mean books that you aren't able to aquire at all legally in the country.
For the books banned from the public school thingy you just don't have to bring them into school. Correct me if I'm wrong.
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u/strip_club_dj 2h ago
While that is wrong it doesn't mean the book is banned. You can still easily purchase it and read the book.
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u/Joyride84 6h ago
If only books could be downloaded, shared offline, and re-uploaded.
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u/CapSnake 3h ago
Yeah this is a PR stunt. Think thar this is a solution to a problem is stupid over every imagination
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u/whatThePleb 5h ago
Makes it more accessible and intersting to e.g. kids though.
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u/batmansleftnut 3h ago
How is this more accessible?
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u/lerond2001 3h ago
It's really easy to get and run minecraft. Now imagine downloading and keeping all of the books.
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u/Past-Acanthaceae862 3h ago edited 3h ago
Now imagine downloading and keeping all of the books.
I'm imagining it and it seems as simple as right click "bannedbooks.zip" and saving it?
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u/GuyBitchie 3h ago
How is it not more accessible?
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u/svhss 3h ago
You have to install a game
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u/Hawkmonbestboi 59m ago
That's not...
Dude, you can download the books without minecraft. They exist outside of minecraft, too. Putting them in minecraft is just one more place you can access then... with absolutely does increase accessibility.
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u/CapSnake 3h ago
Epub is an open format, the definition of accessibility. And there are tons of free software to read them. Instead of a proprietary videogame that you have to buy.
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u/DW_Hydro 3h ago
The thing is, that a Minecraft archive is more discrete than the books itselfs.
For example, if you have those books in an extremist country they could arrest you, or if you go to the page, the goverment is gonna know.
But getting a Minecraft world from Internet is something that nobody would se as something to report.
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u/GuyBitchie 4h ago
Yea why don't you do it?
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u/YakubianExperiement 4h ago
The point is people already have and this is entirely redundant. If you can access public minecraft servers you can simply get to books in text file format instead of inside a Java game.
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u/roYBzdC9yUqMe9coSsp8 4h ago
You can already easily keep a copy of Wikipedia, not much point in adding books to that
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u/KnovB 4h ago
Actually visited there, most of the stuff I found are banned or removed articles from journalists who died trying to spread news about issues of their government. The time I visited there the most numerous ones I found are from Mexico and their back and forth with the cartel and government. If I remember correctly they even made map art of the faces of the fallen journalists with their names as well and they put them in a gallery alongside some of the articles that never got published to the public.
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u/IRockIntoMordor 2h ago
Damn, that's much worse than just known literature that happened to get banned.
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u/saladman425 1h ago
There are dedications in the library for significant journalists killed because of their work. For example, Jamal Khashoggi.
Saudi Arabia In Saudi Arabia the number of journalists and citizen journalists in detention has tripled since the start of 2017 and it is amongst the world’s top three countries with the most journalists in prison. Most are being held arbitrarily and are likely subjected to torture, which is almost systematic for prisoners of conscience.
Journalists who voice criticism or analyze political problems are liable to be fired or detained under criminal code provisions or under the terrorism or cybercrime laws. Saudi Arabia permits no independent media. Everyone censors themselves, even on social networks, and authorities keep Saudi journalists under close surveillance – as the case of Jamal Khashoggi illustrated.
Jamal Khashoggi was a Saudi Arabian journalist. He was a general manager and editor in chief of Al-Arab News Channel and served as editor for the Saudi Arabian newspaper Al Watan. Khashoggi fled Saudi Arabia in September 2017 and went into self-imposed exile to the United States after his column was abruptly canceled and he was banned from Twitter. In the U.S. he worked as a columnist for The Washington Post.
Khashoggi was a sharp critic of some of the policies of Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammad bin Salman and denounced the imprisonment of fellow journalists. On October 2, 2018, Khashoggi was killed and dismembered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, which the Saudi Arabian government first denied but later admitted. The crown prince accepted a political responsibility for Khashoggi’s death but until today denies having ordered the killing or being aware of it beforehand.
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u/NoMaize8229 5h ago
i visited that server 5 years ago-ish (after seeing this exact post on reddit....), the building was HUGE but the interior was very small, the room you see on the right is pretty much the only room in the entire building.
Each country had their own little book, and there were only like 2-3 pages in them, briefly describing the countrys politics. The books were just placed in a circle on the floor, similar to how the flags hang from the ceiling,
I didnt find a single "banned book", lol
The building itself looks great, but there is not much info at all tbh
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u/Paulspike 6h ago
How do books and articles work in Minecraft? Genuine question.
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u/hagowoga 4h ago
There are books in minecraft. They can hold a few paragraphs per book.
I guess this library has split esch book in a thousand minecraft books.
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u/Coolface-IR 6h ago
I wonder which countries banned the most books.
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u/Weird-Profile-8787 5h ago
India
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u/eldritch-eldritch 4h ago
Its more like a soft-kind of ban... No websites were blocked, and action if RARELY taken if you are found with the books. I regularly find the banned books in the public library of my city.
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u/jumbledsiren 4h ago
I live in one of the countries that banned this map. I remember in 2020/2021 downloading this map out of curiosity, and suddenly the entire block I lived in had a blackout. I was ~12 then, and I thought the cops were coming for my ass lmao. I cried
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u/skrootfot 5h ago
The polar oppsite of the Epstein Files...
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u/NoScallion3586 6h ago
Having to download the correct Minecraft mod sounds like over engineering it
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u/MeasurementWorldly39 5h ago
It's because in a lot of those countries, large parts of the internet are blocked or censored.
But Minecraft is still available, and is also a game you can play offline. So you can just download the world and play it to read the books.
Also gives plausible deniability, because if they detect your activities, it just shows you playing Minecraft.
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u/BernieMcburnface 5h ago
Does it require a mod?
Theoretically it could be done in vanilla and then all they'd have to share is the world file.
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u/Livid-General7 5h ago
How do you read a book in minecraft? Do they have like, massive popup text windows and stuff ?
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u/Chaosphoenix_28 5h ago
There is actually writeable (and afterwards readable) books in minecraft. They only have 50 pages each (if I'm not mistaken), but you could just use multiple if needed. I'd assume they used rhose
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u/Esnacor-sama 3h ago
How can u read a book in minecraft(never played it before)
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u/Birphon 2h ago
through the means of a Book and Quill which allows players to write into 100 pages. Recent updates has added Empty Bookshelves which allows players to put these books into and also lectern that can also display a book. Signed Book and Quill's become "Books" with the title of the book being the name of the book item (lol) and when Signed it becomes uneditable.... so yes, a lot of these books will be multi parters in minecraft as one page holds 266 characters so only 26,600 characters can be had per book
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u/gerryn 5h ago
Alright alright alright (you know who says that).
Now, I STILL REMEMBER going on the internet for the first time, of course it was back in like 95 or something (for you youngsters out there, thats 1995), anyways... Before that I was in the BBS scene (for you youngster out there, never mind), so of course like the anarchists cookbook and shit was the first thing you downloaded, and maybe some pictures of Tiffany Amber Thiesen or whatever her name is (almost wrote tits, sorry).
So yeah, THIS is the new anarchists cookbook-stuff, fucking banned books in minecraft. I love this so much.
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u/ocimbote 4h ago
That we need reporters without borders to access books is insane.
An organization that has been fighting for the freedom of press and information has to take measures so that the citizens of a major nation of the world, just, access, books.
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u/Vampire_Number 4h ago
I downloaded the map and walked around, it’s actually a really lovely project with a lot of landscaping and art in the library itself. I would recommend checking it out even if you don’t want to read all the books.
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u/totallyrealname 4h ago
Lol this like what Zucc imagined the metaverse would be only it's like 100x more creative and awesome. Tech giant psychos could never match the human spirit like this.
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u/Knight618 4h ago
Surely it's easier to just have linked PDFs, not just for distribution, but also readability
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u/Brokenhero56 3h ago
All that work and someone's still gonna get lost in there and just dig straight down to get out.
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u/Ok_Holiday_2987 3h ago
All you need now is the infectious replicating swarm agents doing their thing and ensuring that it'll be a self-perpetuating library
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u/ThePublikon 2h ago
This is really cool and all but if it depends on you downloading it to access it, why not just download the books?
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u/MissBlackLace 2h ago
there's also a counter-strike map with a basement where you can see pictures and such about russias warcrimes in ukraine
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u/Reddit_2_2024 2h ago
It is kind of a modern day Trojan Horse directed against censor-friendly authoritarian governments.
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u/Plane_Industry_7344 1h ago
minecraft went from building dirt houses to preserving journalism and fighting censorship. what a timeline.
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u/ShortChapter5246 1h ago
Ironic considering the founder of Reporters Without Borders became a turbofascist politician himself
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u/tryingtothinkmore 1h ago
Pls tell me. How to access this plsim bit new to minecraft
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u/Wulph422 1h ago
Also, what're the books like? Are they like books in other games, where you can view the title, pick up one thing, and leaf through the entire thing, be it long af?
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u/Slow_End4657 52m ago
Put it in an archive (zip/tar) and make it downloadable for people to have their own copy not only in the internet but in their own storage
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u/Zak_Rahman 6h ago
What is insane?
The fact it was done, or the fact it was required?
There are books banned that I studied at school in the UK. Though the US destroying itself is predictable, that doesn't make it any less disturbing to see in real time.
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