Utah and South Carolina have each enacted state-level policies creating what PEN America's tracking refers to as "no read" lists — mechanisms that can restrict a specific book across every state-funded school and library simultaneously, rather than through individual district decisions. Tennessee passed similar legislation but had not implemented it as of PEN America's most recent published index.
PEN America's Index of School Book Bans notes that, due to the difficulty of verifying whether every affected district actually held a copy of each restricted title, these statewide policy-driven removals are tracked separately from the organization's district-level ban index, which recorded 6,870 instances of book removal in the 2024-2025 school year across 23 states.
Separately, data compiled by World Population Review shows book ban totals vary enormously by state, with Florida recording more than 8,800 district-level bans as of the most recent available data, followed by Iowa and Texas each with over 3,700. The variation reflects both differing local policies and how repeat challenges across many districts within a state are counted.
Regardless of a book's status in any specific state, public libraries, bookstores, and legal digital lending services in other jurisdictions typically continue to carry commonly restricted titles. See our guide to finding banned books legally for specific access options.
Sources: PEN America, World Population Review.