Regime-banned books are in school libraries and on indigo bookshelves at eye level for children.
REAL banned books are often decades out of print, going for hundreds of dollars used on eBay, they've been disappeared by publishers and distributors in spite of interest and demand. Others have authors who've died or been imprisoned for their ideas, yet more have been removed from city or university-wide library systems so that their "Misinformation" and "Lies" do not poison impressionable scholars.
Yet more are suppressed algorithmically, not appearing on the author's wikipedia page and not appearing in Google search if you type the author and "book" or "memoirs"... but only appearing when you already know the full title of the work (try this yourself: Type in "Pinochet Memoirs", and then type in "Pinochet: A journey through a life")
Yet others are explicitly banned, some to the point where a mere PDF on your hard drive can result in a decade-long sentence... IN THE UNITED KINGDOM, NEW ZEALAND, and AUSTRIA.
This has been a massive project. over 200 titles on the full list and 10,000 words in my "Cursory" survey.
Let me take you on a journey into the heart of the forbidden
UPDATE: Also Checkout My Addendum to The Real Banned Book list on Holocaust Revisionist Liturature
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Notes -
I would point out that the Ian Smith book you mentioned is still widely available. The 2008 edition was retitled Bitter Harvest: Zimbabwe and the Aftermath of its Independence and while print copies are still hard to find, you can get a Kindle version on Amazon for $7.99. I don't think most of the books you mentioned are difficult to find due to any concerted effort to censor them; I think it's more that these were books that didn't sell well to begin with and don't have enough of a market for anyone to keep them in print. The authors of a lot of them are also dead, so there's no one left with the motivation to do something like buy the rights back from the publisher and make it available for free. This explains the huge cliff you see on availability between 1940 and 1980. The old copyright system required renewal for certain works and a lot of stuff published before 1940 is likely to have a lapsed copyright, so making it available online is easy. Books published after 1980 have authors who are more likely to be alive and there's someone with obvious motive to advocate for the work to be published. But stuff in that valley you talk about is likely to still be under copyright and have an author who is dead. This isn't much of a problem for most books, because there isn't much call for diet books from 1966 and the like (I personally collect old outdoors books and they're usually pretty cheap). But the kinds of thing you're talking about have collector value, so the few copies available are going to go for top dollar. This would probably still be true even if the text itself were reprinted in a new edition that's easily available, a la the Smith book.
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