The startup that turned Texas’s book ban law into big business

In 2023, as Texas lawmakers debated Senate Bill 13—a controversial bill aimed at restricting certain books in public school libraries and expanding parental oversight—Steve Wandler was among the dozen-plus parents, educators, and advocates who testified before the legislature. Wandler wasn’t just another concerned citizen. He was a Canadian entrepreneur who had relocated to Texas the year before to found Bookmarked, a fledgling startup that promises to help school districts manage their library collections and give parents greater visibility into what their children are reading.

The legislation addressed the very issue Wandler believed his company could help solve. The bill, authored by Republican state Senator Angela Paxton, would require districts to pull books featuring content deemed by local school boards to be “profane,” “indecent,” or “sexually explicit,” and expanded parents’ rights to monitor their children’s borrowing histories and restrict what their children could check out. It was part of a broader political push that also included HB 900, which required book vendors to rate school library materials for sexual content (though a federal appeals court later blocked enforcement of the rating mandate as unconstitutionally broad).

Wandler spoke in support of SB 13, telling lawmakers it “empowers parental access” and “mandates accountability with the school districts.” His investment in the bill’s passage wasn’t merely rhetorical: Public records show Bookmarked spent at least $80,000 lobbying in favor of the measure, and later hired the powerful Texas lobbying firm Moak Casey to help promote its cause.

Still, critics saw SB 13 differently, with free-speech advocates warning the new system amounts to codified censorship. Tasslyn Magnusson, a senior advisor with the Freedom to Read Program at PEN America, says that tools aggregating and circulating lists of challenged titles can reshape library collections in subtle but consequential ways. “When you start flagging books as somehow bad or under issue in other districts and other states, you’re undermining your local community control of what a school should have available for its students,” she tells Fast Company.

Texas lawmakers ultimately moved forward anyway. Within months of SB 13’s June 2025 passage, Bookmarked, then without any district clients, began marketing its software as a tool designed to help districts navigate the law’s new requirements, according to brochure materials provided to Fast Company. The platform promised to highlight potentially problematic titles for school boards, streamline review processes, and give parents direct access to their children’s reading histories by integrating with library systems (that checkout data is stored on Amazon Web Services). In an interview with Fast Company, Wandler describes the product as decision support rather than a censorship engine: “We’re just showing you what we find on the internet. We’re not telling you what to do.”

In doing so, the Dallas-based upstart quickly became a key player in a new and deeply contested corner of the edtech market, providing its software to more than 150 districts across Texas, according to Wandler—though that footprint is more complicated than it may appear, spanning a mix of paid contracts and free pilot programs. (Wandler says a soon-to-be-released updated version of Bookmarked would standardize pricing at $3 per student.)

Bookmarked was initially backed by angel investors and remains angel funded, according to Wandler, who says the company is now seeking additional capital after gaining traction in Texas. He describes the company’s tech as a practical solution, one that helps districts maneuver an increasingly complex legal environment while connecting families more directly to their children’s reading. He acknowledges the fears over a system that might accelerate book removals, but insists his company has been a neutral player. “We try to be Switzerland,” he says. “And it’s hard to be Switzerland.”

‘The process is almost unattainable’

In marketing materials issued in June 2025 and shared with Fast Company, Bookmarked presents itself as a shield against risk. OnShelf, its AI-powered platform that tracks school library catalogs and calls out books that could draw complaints under the new laws, would help districts “navigate SB 13 with confidence and clarity,” Bookmarked promised.

In practice, OnShelf works by ingesting a school district’s library catalog and comparing it against a growing database of titles that have been challenged or restricted elsewhere. According to internal company documents viewed by Fast Company, its AI engine “scans and collects” online data daily—including news reports, advocacy lists, and district records—to track books that have been banned or challenged across the U.S. and generate a list of “potential flags.” OnShelf also, per internal documents, supplies librarians with weekly automated emails “summarizing the ‘health’ of their collection based on any new nationwide challenge trends.”

The company’s early development was closely tied to a Texas public-school superintendent. Jason Cochran, now head of Krum Independent School District (ISD) in North Texas, says he approached Wandler with the original idea and helped shape an early version of the product. Cochran today retains a small ownership stake (less than 1%, he says) and serves informally as an advisor. His district uses the software free of charge, an arrangement he says he requested in part to avoid conflicts tied to his ownership stake. (Some have questioned whether Cochran’s dual role as a district leader and a financial stakeholder in a vendor serving schools presents a conflict of interest.) Cochran says the tool has helped his district spot challenged books and ensure “there wasn’t anything on the radar that was going to cause conflict.”

Bookmarked arrived at a moment of profound uncertainty. Across the United States, efforts to challenge and remove books from schools had surged dramatically. In 2024, the American Library Association recorded 821 censorship attempts targeting 2,452 unique titles, reflecting a shift toward organized bulk challenges wherein efforts to remove large numbers of books rely in part on prepared lists from conservative advocates. (By comparison, the annual average from 2001 to 2020 was just 273 titles.) Among the books banned by districts in Texas so far: Safe Sex 101: An Overview for Teens, Between the World and Me, Gender Queer, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

As the San Antonio Express-News reports, Bookmarked has already had sweeping real-world effects in Texas districts. About an hour south of Austin, in New Braunfels ISD, administrators used the software to identify more than 450 library books that might violate SB 13—prompting the district to close its library for two weeks while officials reviewed titles ranging from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to The Handmaid’s Tale. Similarly, in the West Texas city of Abilene, the platform sounded the alarm on more than 300 books for review during an early pilot program, according to reporting by the literary news website Book Riot. 

In Abilene, the relationship reportedly soured quickly. Lyndsey Williamson, Abilene’s executive director of secondary education, wrote in a September email that the company “made promises they couldn’t keep,” per the Express-News. (Abilene ISD did not respond to Fast Company’s request for comment.) Separately, one parent who lives in a district that uses the software tells Fast Company they had a hard time actually removing their child from the system entirely, claiming that doing so required multiple emails and signed release forms.

‘There was no way to keep up with that information’

Of course, not every district has had that experience. In Canyon ISD, a roughly 11,500-student system in the Texas Panhandle, administrators describe the software as a useful compliance tool. To Lisa Hill, the district’s director of instruction, the appeal was straightforward: As book challenges accelerated nationally, districts lacked a centralized way to track them. “There was no way to keep up with that information on a broad scale,” she says.

Hill says the platform supplements rather than replaces librarians’ expertise and aligns with the state’s emphasis on parental oversight. “All librarians have a master’s degree in library science,” she says, but no one can realistically read every title that enters a collection. The system, in her view, adds visibility for overtaxed district employees. 

But that additional visibility, skeptics argue, can quickly turn into pressure. Perhaps most concerning is the dragnet effect: the risk that the software floods districts with questionable warnings, forcing educators to sort through lists that may be incomplete or misleading. That dynamic, says Anne Russey, a Texas parent and cofounder of the advocacy group Texas Freedom to Read Project, can cause librarians to act quickly rather than carefully—especially when administrations are already overwhelmed (and perhaps extra cautious on account of the recently passed SB 412, which essentially nixed longstanding legal protections for educators for providing materials deemed harmful to minors). “Maintaining a library is a normal part of library science that these certified professional librarians have all learned how to do,” she says.

Leila Green Little, a Texas parent and lead plaintiff in a recent federal lawsuit over library censorship, is more blunt in her assessment: “Bookmarked is a solution to a problem that does not exist,” she says.

Wandler, for his part, doesn’t entirely dispute the criticism. He acknowledges that the data his platform draws from is imperfect at best. Books get marked as banned or challenged even when districts ultimately keep them on shelves, producing alerts that don’t always tell the full story. But the platform, he insists, is only surfacing information. “We just show you [that] To Kill a Mockingbird has 20 flags on it. Do with it what you please,” he says. The 1960 novel has been challenged in districts across the U.S. over its use of racial slurs and depictions of racism, a deeply ironic twist given that the book is widely regarded as a critique of racism itself.

Wandler is also candid about the stumbles along the way: “We’ve made a ton of mistakes,” he says, ”as startups do.” That’s why, he adds, Bookmarked is currently rebuilding the product from the ground up. The new version, now being piloted and slated for a broader April rollout, shifts focus from simply surfacing “book intelligence” to better helping districts navigate the byzantine approval workflow SB 13 requires (think elements like teacher book submissions and committee review). “Nobody built a product to be able to manage the process that this law has created,” Wandler says. “The process is almost unattainable, like it’s impossible for them to be able to do the work that the law does.”

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