More Thoughts on Amazon’s Bad Book Problem

Some follow-up thoughts to my recent “We Are All Book Banners Now” post, occasioned by an interview with GalleyCat I did Monday morning…

As several observers predicted, when Amazon appeared to cave in to consumer demands to remove That Book, it emboldened people to demand more items be pulled from Amazon’s inventory, and not just books and videos considered in the same territory as the original offender. Now PETA has gotten into the act, issuing an open letter to Jeff Bezos and asking him to remove books about dogfighting. Frankly, I don’t see any reason why devout Muslims shouldn’t take this opportunity to petition Amazon to stop selling books that contain pictures of the prophet Mohammed, or even novels that feature him as a character, if we’re all serious about taking widely held cultural values seriously enough that we would ask bookstores to willingly help suppress books that contradict those values as a contribution to the public good.

That said, it’s possible that Amazon hasn’t entirely abandoned its commitment to stocking every book available, no matter how repugnant some consumers might find it. There’s a critical distinction to be made between Amazon.com as a retail vendor, and Amazon Digital Services as a technology provider which enables authors to self-publish their own work digitally. I’m strictly inferring this, because so far Amazon has said nothing about why they stopped selling That Book, but—there is a clause in the Amazon Digital Services guidelines which says…

“What we deem offensive is probably about what you would expect. Amazon Digital Services, Inc. reserves the right to determine the appropriateness of Titles sold on our site.”

That’s a perfect out for Amazon to decide that while it will carry any book that anybody else goes to the trouble of publishing, it doesn’t have to publish your e-book for you. But the events of the last week should demonstrate to authors that you can’t trust Amazon Digital Services to support the free expression of your creative vision. When push comes to shove, even if Amazon has already agreed to help you sell your e-book in the Kindle store, if it catches enough flak from customers over what you’ve written, it will drop your book instantly.

Sure, you can tell yourself that what you’ve written isn’t anywhere near as provocative as That Book, but you can’t know that for certain. After all, Sherry Jones thought Ballantine Books was all set to publish her novel about Mohammed’s wife, A’isha, until they abandoned her weeks before the expected publication date, over much less hostility than Amazon had to face last week. It can happen to you, too, especially if the list of subjects about which people feel strongly enough to agitate Amazon expands.

Amazon has been facing battles over books like the one that sparked last week’s controversy for over a decade, and it’s usually held firm to its “you want it, we can sell it to you” policy—but this was the first such battle I can remember in the age of pervasive social media technologies like Facebook and Twitter, which made this controversy very public, very quickly. Just like last year’s uproar over the “glitch” that disappeared nearly every book with gay or lesbian themes from the store’s search results and sales rankings, Amazon now has to deal with a world in which a few scattered disgruntled customers can become an international mob within hours, if not minutes.

Here’s the audio of that GalleyCat interview, where I have a bit more to say about all this.

16 November 2010 | theory |