I’ve sold mostly books on Amazon for about 12 years, excellent customer service and compliance to the extent a person can remain compliant with the constantly moving targets. You don’t keep bucking the AZ bronco for 12 years without being thrown minus doing things right. In total I’ve carried about 15,000 titles, currently over 5,000 in inventory. Lots of interesting and often rare stuff, all genres, many academic titles.
The account despite excellent metrics is now showing as At Risk with 3 Restricted Policy Violations because Amazon has without warning banned 3 titles for content. The first was a college classroom-intended paperback Mein Kampf with a foreword by a history professor about the content. This was not a leather bound coffee table Baby’s First Mein Kampf with a gilded swastika for the deranged parent. I posted about this banning on my social media and one of my friends who happens to be Jewish noted that he was assigned passages of Mein Kampf in Hebrew school, which makes perfect sense to me.
Just now I’ve received an email that two books were banned the same day, two more strikes on my account. For over a year I’ve had a rarish early printing of The Turner Diaries for sale, a work of fiction (!) about a right wing militia insurgency in the US. I haven’t read it - believe it or not I don’t read every book I sell, impossible on top of undesirable - but I’ve known about it since the 90s, & the content seems similar to Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang (not yet banned, give it time) with adjustments for philosophy and targets. Banned at the same time was For My Legionnaires, the 1936 “Romanian Mein Kampf” which spurred on the Iron Guard in that country and is an important historical text for anyone studying Romanian history. Ironically the book was initially banned in Romania when first published, seeing as the government had a censorship board.
It’s not that I specialize in rightist texts - far from it, I’m an old school liberal which to me means no censorship - I just happen to have 5,000+ titles for sale and we’re opening things up to the public to ban titles now, so that’s going to affect every bookseller with an awful chilling effect. As far as Amazon is concerned now however I’m a fascist crank and a danger to the community.
All of these are books Amazon allowed sale of FOR A QUARTER CENTURY then banned overnight without warning and is dinging seller accounts on as if we were selling baby food enhanced with glass shards.
We’re headed to a very dark place in the US regarding availability of books. Along with anything rightist I predict bannings of ‘cancelled’ earlier wave feminist texts for being “trans-exclusionary.” Tick tock, give it time. Whatever you like to read is next. I predict this thread gets censored and locked before the end of the weekend.
On top of this, publishers of a lot of titles are cutting deals to restrict secondary market sales of their books as used, raising your prices and limiting what I can sell. Marvel for example I don’t bother to try and list any longer, third party sellers are simply blocked through corporate dealings from listing without presenting a recent wholesale invoice from the publisher. This is a means of subverting secondary sales allowances in the Copyright Act.