You may already have heard that this is Banned Books Week, a venerable event established 33 years ago by the American Library Association (ALA). Like me, you may have walked into your local bookstore and seen a display of "banned books," a display designed to stoke indignation and righteous First Amendment fury.

My goodness, I said to myself as I walked up to the display, they banned Where's Waldo? What's the world coming to?

Upon closer inspection, and a little bit of Googling, it turns out many of these banned books were merely "challenged" — which means one or two ignorant and/or censorious parents filed a complaint with their local school or library about some innocent tome.

For example, I bought M.T. Anderson's award-winning satirical young adult novel Feed, partly because it sounded cool and prophetic (a not-so-future world where kids can't disentangle from the constant streams of media piped into their heads) and partly because the bookstore told me it was banned for being "trash" and "covered with the F-word." Sounds like a great recommendation, I thought.

Bought this from my local bookstore because #bannedbooksweek. Unfortunately I fact-check: this book was not banned. It was "challenged," meaning one idiot parent complained but the library kept carrying it. A photo posted by Chris Taylor (@futurechris) on Sep 28, 2015 at 5:43pm PDT

In fact, not only is Feed quite quaint by modern standards (these distracted, oversexed teens would be stunned by Facebook or Tinder), not only is it not covered with the F-word as promised (I only spotted one "fuck" in the first few chapters), but it turns out it wasn't even banned.

According to Marshall University in West Virginia, which keeps track of such things, Feed was merely challenged once at the William Monroe High School in Green County, Virginia, in 2013, where it was part of a lesson plan. The result of that challenge? "A consent form was sent to the students' homes, and a notice that the class would be reading a mature book was posted on the teacher's webpage as well."

That apparently hasn't stopped Anderson from claiming in one interview that Feed "has been banned a few times in Iowa and that kind of thing." If Feed was ever banned in Iowa or anywhere else, it has escaped the attention of watchdogs at the ALA and elsewhere.

Claiming a book has been banned, or willfully misunderstanding the difference between a challenge and a ban, is no doubt good for business in a world that despises censorship. It certainly worked on this book buyer.

But if you indulge in that sort of thing, not only are you making yourself less trustworthy (sorry, local bookstore), you're also flooding the market with fake stories — and reducing the amount of attention paid to real book censorship problems when they come along.

For instance, you may have read last month that the mother of a 15-year-old in Knoxville, Tennessee, wanted to ban a jaw-droppingly excellent work of science nonfiction, Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. With astonishing ignorance, the mother claimed Lacks was "pornographic" because the titular character finds a tumor in her cervix with her finger.

So, nutty overprotective mom doesn't understand basic medicine. Big whoop. The challenge went nowhere — except the websites of the BBC, Salon, the Guardian, and dozens of other outlets. Skloot let her indignation be known on her Facebook page, and no doubt sold a few extra books. Imagine the furor if the Knoxville school district had actually agreed with the mom.

As a Salon columnist noted, books simply aren't banned in the U.S. any more, calling the whole basis of Banned Books Week into question. (The most recent ban in any U.S. school, according to the ALA's own material, was in 1994.)

Or rather, it begs this question: Why aren't we paying this much attention to parts of the world, including free-speech-friendly countries, where forms of book censorship are still in effect? Why wasn't it news around the world when a book was burned by religious extremists in India, and the intimidated author gave up writing and asked his publishers for the book to be withdrawn?

Or did you know that a bookstore in Adelaide, Australia, was actually raided by police this summer, because it fell afoul of national censorship legislation? I certainly hadn't heard about that until I started looking into the whole book ban thing.

It turns out there's one book in Australia that must be sold with a sealed plastic wrapper on it, by law. That book is Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho. This is ridiculous on a number of levels. First of all, Psycho is a dark comedy. Yes, it contains grisly first-person descriptions of killings the main character, a cookie-cutter Wall Street yuppie named Patrick Bateman, has supposedly committed. But these are juxtaposed with equally lengthy, supposedly serious descriptions of Phil Collins albums, Armani suits and hair products.

That's the whole point. It's a satire of modern culture. If you read through to the end, you realize Bateman's sanity is in question and he probably didn't commit the murders after all. The book contains the sentence "On The Patty Winters Show this morning a Cheerio sat in a very small chair and was interviewed for close to an hour."

It's 2015. No democracy in the world should be requiring that any book be sold in a dumbass plastic wrapper, least of all a book that writers like Irvine Welsh consider "one of the greatest novels of our time." We should be outraged about this, about the South Korean military's seditious books list, about the Da Vinci Code being banned in Lebanon. (I'm no Dan Brown fan, but still.) And we should definitely start having the difficult conversation about what happens at the end of this year when Mein Kampf falls out of copyright and can be published in Germany, where it is currently banned for good reason.

But we can't begin to discuss the real problems of censorship if our awareness is dulled by a focus on cranks who think they see a nipple in Where's Waldo. That's what got the famous kids' book briefly banned from a few pubic schools in Michigan and one in New York in 1989 and 1993, respectively.

I'm not trying to minimize the dangers of cranks, or say that there's no chance the overzealous and prudish could see their way clear to banning a book in the future. But by and large, those days are over. America, a few ill-informed attention-seeking parents notwithstanding, has learned its lesson. Let's stop fighting old battles, because there's a new global frontier where we could effect some change.

In the war against book banning, it's high time we turned the page.