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Censorship is a phenomenon that has been present in the history of reading and publishing since books began to consolidate as the preferred format for the transmission of thought. Powers of all kinds, both civil and ecclesiastical, combated any form of deviation or dissent from official doctrines through the prohibition of works and the persecution of authors, printers, booksellers, and publishers. With several centuries of validity, its exercise was an insurmountable and pernicious obstacle in the process of transferring any type of information. When it had seemed to have disappeared thanks to the generalization of human rights, mainly those related to freedom of expression, it has now returned in our days with special virulence in the form of revisions of classic literature according to the patterns of political correctness under the purging, elimination, or prohibition of works in public and school libraries in response to the demands of conservative or extreme right-wing pressure groups. We are at a time when these new forms of censorship, open in some cases and subliminal and subtle in others, threaten to hinder not only the freedom of access to information, but also the cultural memory of the places where they are exercised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading takes on a multifaceted nature subject to varied interpretations depending on the perspectives from which it is approached, but there is a general consensus regarding its virtues and benefits for the population in general and for the development of culture in particular. The technological changes that reading has undergone during the last decade, which involve all the parts of its value chain, have added functionalities, features, and modalities that considerably expand the range of content available and its forms of consumption. One can speak of reading "in the outdoors," first to give a name to these new practices, and second to refer to the interpretation made of them according to the available measurement tools. The problem arises when analyzing the process by which one goes from the act of reading to the affirmation of "I have read," which is particularly important in the case of books. Books are accepted as the most refined expression of reading practice in the collective unconscious. This is because of their "chronodegradable" condition concerning memory: statements about what is read can refer to inexistent works and depend on the memory's weight and intensity, as numerous experiences and investigations have shown. Despite everything, reading of books represents a utilization of essential skills, especially in the university environment in which the book is experiencing a decisive displacement in favor of other, shorter and more cognitively accessible genres, such as the scientific journal. For all these reasons, suitable procedures must be initiated in the university setting not only to recover the role of prescription and recommendation inherent in teaching practices, especially in the Humanities and Social Sciences, but also to stimulate interest and student use of a genre relegated to an increasingly less consistent voluntarism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]