Thread: Amazon Censorship Expands
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Old 12-30-2010, 10:25 PM   #73
sbtx99
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck View Post
Amazon has the right to sell or not sell anything it likes--but it's sleazy, and possibly fraud, to penalize people for not following instructions they weren't given.

Nothing in Amazon's content guidelines indicates that titles, or titles of some genres, can't contain the word "rape." A quick search turns up several other books with rape in the title, including "The High School Rape Club."

Amazon doesn't have an obligation to carry any particular content, but it does have an obligation to tell its clients what the business rules are, and to apply those rules to all its clients, not selectively by criteria they refuse to define.
The letter from Amazon that the author posted looked like a standard form letter to the "publisher" of the books. Which in this case was also the author. The word "titles" in the context of the form letter struck me as a substitute for stating that the author's books were in violation of content policy. Would be like me using the phrase Random House titles or Penguin titles to refer to books sold by a particular publisher.

And if a company offers to sell content under vague guidelines, and an author makes a conscious decision to sign up anyway, knowing exactly how vague those guidelines are, why is that author then surprised to find his titles pulled due to content violation?
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