Shapes of things (30)

Our friend Roger Kimball wears hats including that of the publisher of Encounter Books. Roger writes us with this public service announcement:

Amazon made headlines in February when they got into the censorship business. Without notice or warning, they summarily delisted Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, a thoughtful, deeply researched, and humane study that I published at Encounter Books some three years ago.

But it turns out that Amazon is not the only woke book store attempting to determine what you may and may not read. We just learned that Bookshop.org, which bills itself as a scrappy alternative to the Bezos Behemoth, has also dropped the book.

We have suspected that this was the case for some weeks. We reached out at least three times to inquire abut the book. The organization never replied to us. At first, our distributor told us that they suspected there were stock issues. Just today, however, they got a direct response from Bookshop.org. This is what they said: “We did remove this title based on our policies [what policies?]. We had multiple complaints and concerns from customers, affiliates, and employees about the title.”

I note that Bookshop.org, like Amazon, continues to sell Hitler’s Mein Kampf, the lunatic anti-Semitic ravings of Louis Farrakhan, and many other similarly unedifying tracts. They do not, however, sell many conservative books, including Heather Mac Donald’s The War on Cops and my own Tenured Radicals. Readers interested in Ryan Anderson’s book can still get it from Barnes & Noble here or directly from Encounter Books here.

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