Yesterday, I went to Powell's City of Books in Portland where they have a huge wall of "banned books". It's quite literally a marketing gimmick.
But obviously none of these books are actually banned in any meaningful sense, and certainly not in the way that books were banned in the US into the 1960s - when the Postmaster General and USPS deputies could riffle through your mail looking for books that you weren't allowed to buy or sell.
What we're talking about now are highly sensationalized stories of books getting "banned" from school libraries, but which actually refer to situations where parents challenge teachers' and librarians' decisions as to which age ranges are deemed acceptable to read certain books, and debates about which books to include in mandatory curriculum.
The fact is, no library has infinite space to house all the literature that has ever been published. So they make active determinations about what to include or not in their libraries. The mere fact that a book wasn't included and isn't available in some middle school library does not mean it was banned, and if that is what it meant, then like 99.9% of everything that has ever been published has been "banned" under that definition.
Increasingly, this all feels more like political grift.