"Remove" would be a more appropriate verb, because the actual implication is that the books in question are "removed" from either the school library or a curriculum (or both). Are there restrictions on, say, carrying the text around in your book bag on school property? On having a digital copy on your device? No?

Then it's not a ban.

Ban means to remove and not let back in.

I don't suppose their school library would accept the charitable donations of the books they just removed.

Probably not, but that's still not a ban, it's an controlled inventory list. You can carry those charitable donations around on your person to your heart's content.

For now

Put down The Handmaid's Tale.

Controlled inventory list is just a name for the tool for keeping track of what's banned.

And it's not a donation if you aren't allowed to donate and have to keep it to carry around.

No, librarians curate their collections, they do not indiscriminately cram the shelves full of anything anyone gives them. Take a look at the processing of donations; most books are discarded, especially today when books are deprecated.

Libraries withdrawing books aren't banning them. If a school had banned a book, then the students would be prohibited from reading it. A student can read whatever he/she wants during free time, at home, whatever. I would imagine that if a teacher assigned a "free choice" book report that a student could even report on a so-called banned book.

The point of withdrawing books from schools and libraries is because they do not fit in the curriculum. Library shelves and curricula have finite space for materials. You can only teach N books per year, and so your school's curriculum decides which N books that's going to be, year over year.

The point of using the word "ban" in headlines is because it is sensationalistic and it angers people and makes them click on that headline and react with outrage that anyone would be exercising such reprehensible censorship. By using the word "ban" they take the focus away from the action or the content of the book and place it on perceived injustice. Even if I disagree with that book's contents, I can be outraged! How do we even know the content and theme of that book, because we didn't even read it!

To read all these headlines coming out, you would think that we are living in Fahrenheit 451 and that firemen are coming out to torch a big "bonfire of the vanities" style of deprecated textbooks and shitty novels. It's hilarious.

You're being downvoted but your analysis is correct. In this case, the article is meant to combine two clickbait antagonists ("book bans" and "ChatGPT"). Like you mention, there's a finite amount of both physical space and time for "books" in a library and curriculum. I'm not sure if people are imagining that both of these things are infinite, but decisions will eventually have to be made about what to include or not. "Book bans" is a good sorting phrase, because people like to imagine (as some sort of LARP) that their political enemies are the Nazis from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, marching around in a circle lighting otherwise reasonable things on fire. Doing this makes it easier to bully people in the middle to agreeing with you, and less easy to actually take a dispassionate approach to analysis of the situation.