Book Review. "That Book Is Dangerous!" by Adam Szetela: Digital Crowds Shrink Publishing Freedom Without Resorting to Law

Szetela examines the pressures that orient editorial choices before publication. Adam Szetela builds his argument on this premise: contemporary censorship no longer needs the State to exercise itself. In That Book Is Dangerous!, first published on August 12, 2025 by MIT Press and reissued in paperback on June 9, 2026, Szetela examines the effect of public online protests and internal publishing practices on literary freedom. The book examines these tensions without reducing freedom of expression to faction disputes.

The Essentials

Szetela argues that self-censorship in American publishing can take on a structural dimension: publishers may be led to anticipate the reactions of social networks before a controversy even forms.
Digital campaigns pressuring private publishers—petitions, boycott calls, open letters from employees—can have effects on publication decisions without passing through a legal mechanism.
The work suggests a shift in risk: commercial reputation and internal cohesion of publishing houses can weigh on the circulation of certain ideas, beyond legal constraints alone.
Szetela does not defend a naive liberalism of speech: he poses the question of what open societies lose when private intermediaries arbitrate access to ideas without transparent frameworks.
The book leaves the question of remedies open, which constitutes both its limitation and its intellectual honesty.

Adam Szetela and the Genealogy of a Book

Adam Szetela is a researcher in law and political theory, specializing in civil liberties and transformations of the public sphere in the digital age. His earlier work focused on the dynamics of polarization in American academic institutions, a natural terrain for observing how norms of discourse form and are imposed outside any legal framework. That Book Is Dangerous! extends this trajectory by shifting attention toward the publishing industry, a sector that readily presents itself as a guardian of pluralism but which, according to Szetela, has developed its own forms of internal discipline.

The Thesis: Censorship Without a Designated Censor

The book’s title is deliberately ironic. The phrase “that book is dangerous” refers to labels circulating on social networks before the incriminated books are even published, sometimes before they are read. Szetela is interested in how such a label can weigh on the fate of a publication. His analysis focuses notably on anticipation: at the stage of manuscript selection, publishers can take into account the reactions that a publication is likely to trigger. They can then consider the risk of internal petitions, public protests from their teams, or campaigns on social networks.

In certain documented cases, a controversy or the perceived risk of controversy contributed to the cancellation of a contract before publication, though this phenomenon cannot be generalized to all editorial decisions.

The phenomenon constitutes a form of private censorship linked to digital controversies. It is private because no State intervenes; online mobilizations can be the trigger, whether anticipated or already underway. Depending on circumstances, a publisher may react to an established controversy or seek to avoid a polemic it deems possible. This changes the nature of the problem: it is difficult to contest a decision based on diffuse fears, or to distinguish a preventive decision from a response to an effective campaign. Nor can one always appeal to a court, an investigative press, or an institutional counterpower.

The decision belongs to a private enterprise, and the reasons invoked often remain unclear: “poor fit with the catalog,” “difficult timing,” “sensitive context.”

Documented Mechanisms: Petitions, Internal Pressure, Anticipation

The analytical heart of the book lies in the description of several concrete cases. Szetela examines situations where authors saw their contracts terminated or their publication delayed following digital campaigns. He also discusses how controversies can influence editorial decisions. He is particularly interested in open letters from publishing house employees, a phenomenon that appeared between 2018 and 2021 in several major New York publishing houses, where employees contested the publication of works deemed contrary to their values. These episodes can be perceived by management as revealing the potential social cost of a controversial publication, relative to its commercial or intellectual benefits.

Open letters signed by employees are first and foremost a form of legitimate protest in a democracy. The question posed by the book is rather that of the institutional response they can provoke: it sometimes happens that the controversy ends in withdrawal rather than in in-depth public discussion on the merits. More broadly, the work invites reflection on the capacity of cultural intermediaries to preserve disagreement in the face of pressures exerted on them.

This distinction is the book’s most valuable contribution. It allows Szetela to escape the symmetrical trap into which many debates on “cancel culture” fall: unconditionally defending all speech in the name of freedom of expression, or conversely denying that organized pressures can produce structural effects on the circulation of ideas. The book thus invites us to hold together two findings: pressures can constitute legitimate protest, but institutions retain the responsibility to define and defend their mission.

The Political Economy of Publishing

Szetela situates these mechanisms within a specific economic structure. American publishing is a concentrated sector, dominated by a few large groups whose decisions shape a large share of commercial mass-market supply. This concentration can increase attention paid to each individual decision. Decisions by major publishers can be closely observed and influence sector perceptions, but reactions vary from case to case; it is not demonstrated that they systematically produce a signaling effect throughout the book chain, from literary agents to authors themselves.

Certain works withdrawn by major publishers have been picked up by other publishing houses. The extent of this phenomenon, as well as its structural causes, is however not established. When a book is published by another means after withdrawal, its distribution and visibility can vary greatly depending on the house that publishes it. A work that goes through an independent route is not censored in the legal sense of the term, but it may encounter different circulation conditions in public space.

This shift has effects on authors themselves and joins a broader issue regarding the health of democratic debate. Culture repairs what war effaces, but it does so only if its own institutions integrate disagreement rather than managing it through avoidance.

The Blind Spots of a Convincing but Partial Demonstration

The empirical limitations of the subject merit noting. The publicly accessible cases do not, by themselves, allow establishing a solid statistical trend: the precise reasons for editorial decisions are not always made public, and separating commercial arbitrations from concerns linked to a controversy requires knowledge of internal discussions at publishing houses.

The book is also less convincing on the question of remedies. Szetela identifies the problem with precision, but his proposals remain cautious, almost timid. He mentions codes of professional ethics for publishers, charters of editorial pluralism, policies of transparency on publication decisions. These avenues are reasonable, but they presuppose an institutional will that the book itself has just shown as deficient. The tension remains open: rules remain to be defined to protect plurality without imposing on publishers an impossible neutrality in a polarized environment.

Szetela does not settle the matter, and the reader closes the book with the problem better posed, but without a map to get out of it.

Another angle is missing: international comparison. Szetela’s analysis is entirely centered on the United States. Yet the dynamics he describes are not unique to the American market. British, French, and German publishers have gone through similar episodes, with different institutional responses, sometimes firmer, sometimes more accommodating. A comparative perspective would have strengthened the thesis by giving it a systemic rather than anecdotal character.

There also remains a question that the book touches on without developing it: that of the asymmetry of pressures. Szetela concentrates primarily on campaigns he presents as coming from progressive milieus against books or authors accused of producing offensive representations. But right-wing pressures on publishing also exist, in different forms, sometimes legal (defamation suits, political pressure on school libraries), sometimes digital. A complete theory of the problem should map both directions. The fact that Szetela explores only half the territory does not invalidate his argument, but reduces its analytical scope.

AI amplifies the inequalities it promised to erase: the same selection bias often strikes tools that promise to neutralize power dynamics—they reconfigure them more than they eliminate them.

A Useful Book

That Book Is Dangerous! examines the concrete effects of coordinated pressures on editorial choices, while distinguishing them from state censorship. The book thus proposes a reading of the tensions crossing through publishing.

The book invites us to look at freedom of expression beyond legal protections alone. In a liberal regime, it depends not only on constitutional guarantees; in the United States, the First Amendment is robust. Within the framework studied by Szetela, publishers and online discussion platforms can also influence whether books reach the public. Naming the budgetary trajectory is a political act; similarly, naming the mechanisms by which an idea does or does not reach public debate is an analytical act that this book accomplishes with care.

The book addresses several audiences: publishing professionals seeking an unflinching mirror of their own practices, lawyers and theorists of freedom of expression who work too exclusively within the legal framework, citizens wondering why certain ideas circulate less well than others in a formally free democracy. For these readers, That Book Is Dangerous! offers a rare analytical framework: lucid about the pitfalls, honest about its own limitations, and rigorous enough to sustain contradictory debate.

Title: That Book Is Dangerous!
Author: Adam Szetela
Publisher: MIT Press
Date of First Publication: August 12, 2025
Paperback Publication Date: June 9, 2026