Voidly · Verboten · Banned-books index · CC BY 4.0
Which books are banned, where, when, and on whose authority.
Verboten is a structured, source-cited index of book censorship worldwide — 19,283 titles that have been banned or restricted across 119 countries, every ban tied to a date, a stated reason, and a citation you can check. The same facts exist scattered across advocacy indexes, government gazettes, and news reports; Verboten is where they become one queryable answer.
The question only this answers
“Is this book banned in that country — and when did it start, under what reason?”
Look up any of 19,403 titles and see every country that has banned or restricted it, with dates and sources. Built for AI agents and journalists that need a verifiable answer, not a guess.
Search the index →Counts rank on distinct titles and distinct countries, never raw event rows (one US title banned across many school districts would otherwise inflate totals 2–3×).
The most-banned books in the world
Ranked by the number of distinct countries that have banned or restricted the title.
| # | Title | Author | Year | Countries |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Satanic Verses | Salman Rushdie | 1988 | 22 |
| 2 | Lady Chatterley's Lover | D.H. Lawrence | 1928 | 13 |
| 3 | 1984 | George Orwell | 1949 | 12 |
| 4 | Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov | 1955 | 11 |
| 5 | Animal Farm | George Orwell | 1945 | 11 |
| 6 | Tropic of Cancer | Henry Miller | 1934 | 9 |
| 7 | The Da Vinci Code | Dan Brown | 2003 | 9 |
| 8 | Mein Kampf | Adolf Hitler | 1925 | 7 |
| 9 | The Story of O | Pauline Réage | 1954 | 6 |
| 10 | Heartstopper | Alice Oseman | 2018 | 6 |
| 11 | All Quiet on the Western Front | Erich Maria Remarque | 1929 | 6 |
| 12 | On the Origin of Species | Charles Darwin | 1859 | 5 |
| 13 | The Decameron | Giovanni Boccaccio | 1353 | 5 |
| 14 | Fanny Hill | John Cleland | 1748 | 5 |
| 15 | Brave New World | Aldous Huxley | 1932 | 5 |
| 16 | Tropic of Capricorn | Henry Miller | 1939 | 4 |
| 17 | Tokyo Ghoul | Sui Ishida | 2011 | 4 |
| 18 | The Social Contract | Jean-Jacques Rousseau | 1762 | 4 |
| 19 | The Painted Bird | Jerzy Kosiński | 1965 | 4 |
| 20 | The Metamorphosis | Franz Kafka | 1915 | 4 |
| 21 | The Jewel of Medina | Sherry Jones | 2008 | 4 |
| 22 | The Communist Manifesto | Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx | 1848 | 4 |
| 23 | The Anarchist Cookbook | William Powell | 1971 | 4 |
| 24 | Sophie's Choice | William Styron | 1979 | 4 |
| 25 | Portnoy's Complaint | Philip Roth | 1969 | 4 |
Browse by country
Every country with a documented book ban, ranked by number of distinct titles. Each opens a page with the titles, reasons, timeline, and sources for that country.
| Country | Titles | Ban events |
|---|---|---|
| United States | 8,009 | 22,941 |
| Germany | 3,644 | 3,645 |
| Malaysia | 3,090 | 3,131 |
| France | 1,108 | 1,111 |
| Argentina | 642 | 642 |
| Hong Kong | 626 | 627 |
| Russia | 503 | 510 |
| Belarus | 344 | 347 |
| New Zealand | 206 | 206 |
| India | 120 | 120 |
| Vatican City (Holy See) | 119 | 120 |
| South Africa | 86 | 86 |
| United Kingdom | 69 | 73 |
| China | 57 | 59 |
| Iran | 52 | 56 |
| Singapore | 48 | 48 |
| Spain | 42 | 42 |
| Australia | 40 | 42 |
| Ireland | 39 | 39 |
| Vietnam | 31 | 33 |
| Indonesia | 28 | 29 |
| Saudi Arabia | 27 | 27 |
| Brazil | 26 | 26 |
| Israel | 26 | 26 |
| Soviet Union | 26 | 26 |
All 119 countries
Why books get banned
Stated reasons drawn from the source taxonomy, by number of distinct titles. A single ban can cite more than one reason.
- Political content
- 9,813
- Immorality
- 4,797
- Sexual content
- 3,119
- LGBTQ+ content
- 2,573
- Violence
- 2,089
- Other
- 1,679
- Race / colonialism
- 1,579
- Obscenity
- 590
Book bans by decade
Distinct titles first banned or restricted in each decade (1510s–2020s). The recent surge is dominated by US school-district challenges.
How to read this
- Banned vs. restricted
- A banned title is outright prohibited; a restricted one is lawful but constrained (no sale to minors, removed from a school library). They are never merged into one total.
- Challenged is not banned
- A challenge is a request to ban that did not succeed. It is recorded but never counted as a ban.
- Every event is dated
- Each ban carries the year it took effect and, where lifted, the year it ended — so the record is a timeline, not a snapshot.
- Every event is cited
- Each ban links to its source: a government record, classification decision, advocacy index, or news report, with a verification status.
Access & attribution
- Search every titlesearch →
Look up any of 19,403 titles and see where it is banned. Client-side, instant.
- Source datasetZenodo DOI →
Built on the Banned Books Open Censorship Core by banned-books.org, CC BY 4.0. Verboten adds normalization, per-country pages, and the lookup index; our compilation is CC BY 4.0.
Machine access
Verboten is built for AI agents and bots first. Every answer is a plain, cacheable JSON file — no server, no key, no rate limit. Point an agent at the manifest and it can resolve any country or title.
- /verboten/api/index.json
Manifest: dataset stats, country index, endpoint map.
- /verboten/api/country/{ISO}.json
Per-country summary — counts, top reasons, decade timeline, most-restricted titles. Keyed by ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 (e.g. IR, US).
- /verboten/search-index.json
Every title with the countries that ban or restrict it — the lookup index.
Cite this
Attribute both Verboten and the underlying banned-books.org open core. Replace the access date.
AI Analytics. (2026). Verboten — The Global Banned-Books Index [Dataset]. https://ai-analytics.org/voidly/verboten/ (CC BY 4.0). Built on Banned Books — Open Censorship Core (banned-books.org), https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20795629.
@dataset{verboten_2026,
author = {{AI Analytics}},
title = {Verboten --- The Global Banned-Books Index},
year = {2026},
url = {https://ai-analytics.org/voidly/verboten/},
note = {Built on Banned Books --- Open Censorship Core (banned-books.org), DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20795629. Accessed YYYY-MM-DD},
license = {CC BY 4.0}
}