For years, conservatives like Glenn Beck have been advising people to buy physical copies of books and print out online articles. They have warned about the dangerous combination of “cancel culture” and the ease and speed with which books can be taken offline if deemed offensive by the woke elite.
I heard these warnings and dismissed them. After all, it was inconvenient. Why spend the extra two bucks for a paper book and wait for shipping when I can get it on my Kindle instantly? Sure, celebrities and normal Americans are being canceled left, right, and center, but books are different.
I told myself book burnings are a thing of the past. They are just images in history textbooks and dystopian novels. We could never get to that point in America. Amazon would never ban conservative books with which they disagree. That would just hurt their bottom line, right?
Well, turns out I was wrong. We are living through a book burning – a digital book burning. While books are not being doused in lighter fluid and burnt in piles on the streets, they are being burnt out of the marketplace of ideas. The matches of this burning are the new standards imposed by the woke ideology, and the lighter fluid is the companies that are imposing these standards on their customers.
In the past month, we have witnessed the danger of which Glenn Beck warned. On March 2, Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced that six of Dr. Seuss’ books will no longer be printed because some of the illustrations contained in them were deemed “hurtful.” Unsurprisingly, this caused the prices of those books to skyrocket. Stories like this show the lengths to which companies are willing to go in order to fit themselves and their products into the ever-changing window of acceptable speech.
The Dr. Seuss story got a fair amount of coverage in the media, and rightly so. But an even more important story fell through the cracks.
In late February, Ryan Anderson’s book “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment,” a book that looks at gender dysphoria in an organized, compassionate manner, was suddenly removed completely from Amazon’s selling platform. It was not deleted off of Kindle devices, so your ebooks are safe for now, but it can no longer be bought in any format on Amazon. Amazon neither notified nor gave a reason to Anderson as to why his book had been erased from their platform. Only after four U.S. senators wrote a letter to Amazon asking why the book had been banned did Amazon finally give its reasoning. They responded by stating they had changed their policy and have now decided “not to sell books that frame LGBTQ identity as a mental illness.”
Why is this a problem? You might be thinking that it’s just one book, and you can still buy the book directly from the publisher.
While the banning of Anderson’s book is dangerous in and of itself, the effects are far-reaching. Amazon has dominance over the American book market. A remarkable 53% of books and 80% of ebooks sold in the U.S. are sold by Amazon, according to the Wall Street Journal. If you want your book to do well, you need it to be on Amazon. So, naturally, publishers won’t want to risk publishing books that Amazon might deem offensive and not allow on their platform.
Who knows what books are next on Amazon’s list? All books that question the woke creed are on the chopping block. Perhaps it will be pro-life books, or maybe it will be ones that question climate change. No matter where their next target is, it will only further disincentivize publishers from printing books written from a conservative standpoint.
So go out and buy some printed books. Buy books you want to read, and buy books you foresee being canceled. Who knows? Your collection of banned books might be worth millions someday. Who needs a 401(k) when you’ve got Dr. Seuss or Mark Twain sitting on your bookshelf?
David Swegle is a sophomore George Washington Fellow studying economics.
