Amazon Cancels Ryan T. Anderson Book

This is alarming news:

You can still buy the book directly from the publisher, and perhaps from other distributors.

I read the book in 2018, when it came out. It’s first-rate. Anderson is critical of gender ideology, but his book is well-argued and supported by scientific findings. If you don’t agree with him, fine, but give him a chance to make his argument. That’s what we do in a free society.

Amazon is a private business, and in a free society, that means it has the right to refuse to sell anything. Note well that it is selling a pro-trans book titled, Let Harry Become Sally. What’s more, Amazon is also currently selling Hitler’s Mein Kampf. 

That’s right: Jeff Bezos will sell you Hitler’s autobiography, because he correctly trusts readers to understand that malignant book. But he will not sell you a book by the head of a major American think tank, making an argument critical of gender ideology, because … why?

Last year, a coalition of US publishers, booksellers, and authors wrote to Congress to ask for anti-trust action to fight Amazon’s total dominance of the book industry. Their letter said, in part:

Amazon’s scale of operation and share of the market for book distribution has reached the point that no publisher can afford to be absent from its online store.

A year ago, The New York Times reported that Amazon controlled 50 percent of all book distribution, but for some industry suppliers, the actual figure may be much higher, with Amazon accounting for more than 70 or 80 percent of sales.  Whether it is the negative impact on booksellers of Amazon forcing publishers to predominantly use its platform, the hostile environment for booksellers on Amazon who see no choice but to sell there, or Amazon’s predatory pricing, the point is that Amazon’s concomitant market dominance allows it to engage in systematic below-cost pricing of books to squash competition in the book selling industry as a whole.

Remarkably, what this means is that even booksellers that avoid selling on Amazon cannot avoid suffering the consequences of Amazon’s market dominance.

The ongoing COVID-19 crisis is exacerbating the problem:  it continues to threaten the financial well-being of authors, publishers, and booksellers, some of whom will not survive the year.

Amazon, by contrast, with its ever-extensive operation and data network, has grown only more dominant, enjoying its largest-ever quarterly profits during April, May and June.

Amazon can’t claim it isn’t selling the book because there’s no demand for it. When it was first published, When Harry Became Sally made the bestseller lists. 

This is a nakedly political decision by Amazon, which is more afraid of Americans reading Ryan T. Anderson on gender ideology than they are of Americans reading Hitler on his Kampf.

Here’s what this decision means: given Amazon’s power, no publisher is going to publish future titles critical of gender ideology if they risk those titles being de-listed by Amazon. You can still buy Abigail Shrier’s bestselling Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters  on Amazon — but hurry, because it is probably just a matter of time before Bezos cancels it.

You may be a pro-trans person who is perfectly fine with Amazon doing this. You should think twice. A company with the power to prevent books on certain themes from being published, simply because of its might in the retail sphere, is not always going to make decisions of which you approve. It is time for Congress to take antitrust laws seriously in Amazon’s case.

The novelist and essayist Walter Kirn tweeted the other day that now is the time for people to start buying hard copies of books that might be “problematic” — that is, books that the progressive censors might want to disappear from the culture’s memory. He’s right. Make a list of books — classics, whatever — that might be endangered by the Woke, and start buying hard copies now, for yourself, for your kids, for the future. They will be precious before you know it.

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