Amazon has grown increasingly censorious in recent days. The online sales giant became huge by offering anything and everything, but over the past few years, it has, like the other tech giants, begun banning content.
Once a corporation gets a taste for censorship, it will steadily grow more censorious: As I previously discussed, Amazon in 2020 began banning light novels, apparently at random. Then, of course, they coordinated with Twitter, Google, and Apple to delete the microblogging platform Parler from the internet. More recently still, they banned Ryan Anderson’s book, When Harry Became Sally, because it criticized the new religion.
In recent days, I have taken to downloading manga on my Kindle because it’s convenient and cheaper than print. I have a few series I’ve followed that way. Recently, as I was looking over my digital copies of the harem manga We Never Learn, I noticed volume 3 was missing from my collection even though I had purchased and read it. So I checked the Amazon store; it is gone from Amazon entirely, both in print and digitally.
I contacted Amazon, and the tech to whom I spoke eventually told me the book was no longer available, and then he told me this gem:
I slightly regret my emotional incontinence, which I directed at a mere underpaid staffer who is not privy to the reason my property had been taken from me. He did not know why Amazon had deleted a book from my personal library without notice or explanation.
He told me that the availability of the book was up to the “author or content owner,” sidestepping the uncomfortable fact that it is also up to Amazon itself—which has considerably more power—and also sidestepping the fact that Amazon had not merely stopped selling the book but destroyed my copy.
The book, by the way, is still available on Barnes & Noble as of this writing, which indicates that this is an act of censorship on Amazon’s part. As with the previously censored light novels, we will probably never know the reason for sure, but it likely has to do with someone getting offended by the swimsuit on the cover.
This is not the first time Amazon has destroyed customers’ property. Back when the Kindle was new, Amazon revealed that it has the power to delete digital books from our possession without explanation: It famously deleted copies of 1984 right off people’s devices.
The guy I talked to didn’t know why my book had disappeared, nor is there any reason he should. The point of all this, however, is that, when you buy digital, you don’t assume the full control you have when you buy analog, especially in an age of streaming and constant internet connections, an age when our overlords want us to “own nothing and be happy.”
Had I spent the extra money for print copies of this manga, I would still have the whole series without gaps in it; Amazon can delete stuff off my device but can’t break into my house and raid my shelves—yet.
Given how censorious Amazon is becoming, buying print books is increasingly important. This little example of censorship involves a trivial work; its disappearance annoys me, but I won’t shed tears over it. There are, however, much more important and substantial books that will eventually be in our overlords’ crosshairs, and the day will come suddenly when, as with those six Dr. Seuss books, you simply won’t be able to get them at all, anywhere.