Unless you’re under a rock you know what book stirred up the twittersphere and blogosphere today. And many say that Amazon failed with this. Or even that society failed. But I (generally) disagree.
First, let me say that I think this is a terrible book that should never have made it to the light of day. And after reading an interview with the author I really feel sorry for him, and wonder if this book wasn’t a product of many of the situations he has gone through in his life. We should pray that the healing love of God becomes far more evident in his life.
However, in this more-and-more crowdsourced world, we can expect a certain amount of this. In Here comes everybody, Clay Shirky points out how these crowd sharing platforms make it easier for stuff to be published and shared. Even the stuff that we don’t all approve of. Wiccans can easily find meetups. So can anorexics. And today we saw how easy it was to publish something many found horrific. If you get a big enough crowd (300 million adults in America) you’re going to find one or two who are willing to write something like this and publish it–and Amazon just makes it super-easy for this to happen.
At the same time, you’ll find one or two people who are willing to write stuff that you like, that before you would never have seen. For example, I’ve considered publishing some stuff in Kindle format. So for every bad egg, there’s dozens and dozens of very small-niche stuff published that we appreciate. And even some that are more borderline–some that some of us appreciate, and not others. (My own niches include hard science fiction, anything having to do with mining meteors, microscopic inspections of certain historical events, biographies of long dead monks, and gardening books. You probably don’t share many of my fascinations.)
That’s the way this works; it’s the bargain that we make for the power of self-publishing. We are making it easier and easier to share and as part of the bargain accepting that some (very small) minority of stuff will be considered of poor quality. And some of it will be just rotten enough that it has to be pulled. But at the point where someone pushes “publish” not everyone will immediately agree on whether it is that bad. (And I actually don’t think Amazon pre-approves books self-published for the Kindle format? If I understand it right, you upload your book, push a button, and it’s live.)
But today, everyone saw a book and instinctively knew–this shouldn’t be out there for anyone to get. This shouldn’t be promoted or given airspace. This is bad. We–society–reacted, and after the storm of controversy the book was fairly quickly pulled. According to the author of the book, only one copy was sold (although I rather doubt that as I saw others discussing actual content–but perhaps they were only discussing content from a “sample” first chapter delivered for free).
The point is, the crowd has to be vigilant. And there is a fine line of what is acceptable. If you look at Amazon’s free books (and some of it’s pay books), you’ll see there’s lots there I would never read. This book just happened to sink below the threshold of societal acceptance.
In my view, in this bargain, Amazon was right in initially pushing back on behalf of freedom–testing the crowd’s resolve–but also right to yield to societal pressure. Some things we will want to stand up for and this particular balancing act–self-publishing in a civil, free-speech prone society–is a balancing act best done in crowds. Leave censorship solely to a company or a government and you might not like the results. But today society was absolutely right in pushing for this horrific little book to be pulled.
All in all this new bargain seemed to work well today, I think. What about you?
(Updated 9:31pm to clarify some points and add some links)
Update 10/20/2010 11am: In Amazon Banning One Vile Ebook: A Victory For…. What Exactly? Paul Carr makes an excellent cautionary point. Maybe it is #societyfail after all, at least in the broader sense.
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