There is plenty about the modern world that poses threats to children. Books, of all things, generally aren’t among them. Yet our new state librarian — one of the hats worn by the Missouri secretary of state — is following in the performative footsteps of his predecessor by targeting books as a supposed danger to minors. It’s more of the same culture-war tripe that has made Missouri one of the most hostile states in America toward books.

Getting kids to read actual books here in the internet age is challenging enough. The ebook format presumably can overcome that challenge for some kids, if only because they can be read on the screens that already command an outsized portion of young peoples’ attention. It’s certainly preferable to just bumping around online obsessing over TikTok or who knows what else.

People are also reading…

Yet Hoskins essentially is rubber-stamping some recent right-wing hysteria in the Legislature, which is nervous about what kinds of ebooks kids might access on the platform. As if young people with easy smartphone access to the endless realms of sex and violence that permeate the internet are going to secretly troll for digital copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover .

The funding at issue is miniscule — as the Post-Dispatch’s Kurt Erickson reports , the digital platform company has received less than $12,000 in state funding since 2022 — but that’s not the point.

Hoskins here echoes his fellow Republican and predecessor, former Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, who unilaterally forced libraries across Missouri to clear their shelving decisions with his office, based on exactly nothing except Ashcroft’s need for some cultural red meat in his failed gubernatorial campaign.

Like Ashcroft’s stunt, there’s no reason to believe Hoskins’ attack on ebooks will make Missouri’s kids any safer or better educated. If he’s truly interested in that, he should encourage his supermajority party in the Legislature to stop barreling toward irresponsible tax cuts and instead properly fund education. We won’t hold our breath.

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