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Comment by helsinkiandrew | Hacker News Reader

But what actually is happening? Thousands of books go out of print every week. There are over 50 or so Dr Zeus books. If the heirs of the author and publisher no longer want to sell a handful of them will the vast majority of future American readers care?

I would guess that eventually (if these books are popular enough) they will be edited and brought up to date like Richard Scary books:

https://www.upworthy.com/8-changes-that-were-made-to-a-class...

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These are all arguments that would support book banning in the Soviet union and all similar totalitarian regimes.

"Thousands of books go out of print every year, so what's the problem with us banning these specific books for political reasons?"

"Does it really matter that we banned these dozens of books? Thousands others were not banned, and are available to the Soviet reader at the nearest bookstores!"

This is a slipper slope, and we're already sliding quite deeply into it. Amazon just banned a book about transgenderism that it considered "offensive":

https://ncac.org/news/amazon-book-removal

This is clearly the Soviet case: it's not banning a single book, it's banning the ideas that it presents, for being Politically Incorrect. Once the book is unavailable, American readers will not have access to these ideas anywhere. Any other book presenting these same ideas will also be banned on the same grounds.

This is precisely what was happening in the Soviet Union and similar totalitarian regimes that banned "forbidden / politically-incorrect" ideas.

You have to know there is a difference between a private company not selling a bigoted book, and a government banning all books which criticize it

So if our lives are effectively controlled by huge corporations, then we should accept that simply because they are technically companies and not the government?

No, and we should criticize how companies allow access to their platforms, but just because something was denied access to a platform doesnt inherently make it a free speech issue

This is not fighting corporations, this is getting bogged down in culture wars

The solution to that problem is to break up monopolies that have too much power.

We know. But you also know, if there are monopolies, even if they are private, they can meaningfully limit the flow of ideas in a way that is highly problematic.

And the term censorship is broad, and isn't specific to private entities versus government. Just because we don't have a Soviet-style government (good), doesn't mean that automatically everything is free and open. If I buy out all of a particular work of art and burn it in a bonfire, I've committed censorship. If not illegal, it should at least elicit some moral eyebrow-raising, no?

everyone keeps saying this, but ive yet to see the numbers that prove ebay is a monopoly, especially since the books are available for free online

The rights holders can do what they want while they are not in the public domain.

What is wrong is pulling it from stock as well as secondary marketplaces.

What if the Christian or Muslim clerics get to say what books should be pulled too?

> What if the Christian or Muslim clerics get to say what books should be pulled too

As an immigrant from a Muslim country I’m super excited about this. I’m going to ban sex scenes on TV so I don’t have to skip past them.

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