Amazon recently banned the sale of a self-published book titled The Liberator Code Book: An Exercise in Freedom of Speech, saying that it somehow violated the company’s rules. The links to the book, which had been available previously, simply showed error messages.
How exactly the book, which had been published using Amazon’s self-publication services, violated their terms is an open question. When asked, an Amazon representative pointed the reporter to their Kindle Direct Publishing content guidelines. These ban the publication of “pornography, offensive content, illegal and infringing content, public domain and other non-exclusive content, and books that result in a ‘poor customer experience.'”
Stephen Gutowski, writing at the FreeBeacon, believes that Amazon is not applying their standards consistently:
Amazon has long sold a wide range of the world’s most controversial books. Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf is available through multiple listings on the site. Marx and Engles’s Communist Manifesto is also available through multiple listings. The Turner Diaries by Andrew Macdonald—the white supremacist manifesto that helped inspire Timothy McVeigh to commit the Oklahoma City bombing—is for sale on the site. The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the world’s most famous anti-Semitic diatribe, is featured for sale in multiple listings.
Amazon has also long sold a wide range of instruction manuals detailing how to construct improvised weapons. The Anarchist Cookbook is available for sale on the site. The U.S. Army Improvised Munitions Handbook is available for sale. The U.S. Army Special Forces Guide to Unconventional Warfare: Devices and Techniques for Incendiaries is listed for purchase. The U.S. Department of the Army Field Manual on Boobytraps is available on the site as well.
The company even sells The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How To Build an Atomic Bomb,which is a collection of previously classified documents detailing how scientists who worked on the first nuclear bomb went about building it.
The book was probably banned because it had computer code in it that would allow the reader to 3-D print a plastic gun that fires real bullets. Because armed Americans are scarier than Hitler, apparently.
This just shows that it’s a tough time to try to speak into the world about conservative values, as leftist activists attempt to push normal conservative speech — protected, Constitutional speech — into the margins of society.
Image Credit: Aurelijus Valeiša on Flickr
Hat Tip: FreeBeacon