Who's banning books?

In the news where I live are stories about people who want books banned from school libraries.  All the stories fit the stereotype.  Those who want the books banned are inevitably conservative Christians who object to primarily sexual content and the books they wish banned are primarily those that advocate and encourage the kind of sexual content objected to by these people.  The media is happy to paint conservative Christians as book banners and book burners because the pattern sometimes fits reality but always fits the stereotype.  The media loves to hate those kind of people.  Except that the biggest censors of content are not individuals or groups of individuals showing up to school board or library board meetings.  The biggest censor of all is Amazon.

The primary battleground for censorship is online and not in group chat or email but in the retail book business of which Amazon controls more than half!  Yes, you heard me right.  Amazon controls more than half of all the retail book sales in this country.  It is the censor who decides what it is that America reads largely by controlling what it carries.  Gone are the days when physical stores were where we went to find our books -- from the little nooks in small towns or the corner of the drug store that carried books to the giant retailers of the past (Books A Million, Barnes and Noble, or Borders) who set up shop in malls.  Most folk have only one source to purchase books and that is online and Amazon is the bully on the street corner whose decision to stock or omit has profound effect all the way from the comfy chair to the publishing industry itself.

Amazon is wedded corporately and ideologically to the cultural milieu of this moment in America.  So, for example, Amazon decided that Ryan T. Anderson’s book When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment was something that conflicted with its values and therefore also America's values while still selling Let Harry Become Sally, Kelly Novak’s response to Anderson's work.  This is of particular interest to conservative Christians but it is not the only way Amazon decides what is available to the general public and what is not.  The point here is not that Amazon unfairly censors conservative Christian positions and books (which, I would argue, it does) but who appointed Amazon the ultimately authority over what we have access to and what we do not?

Large corporate presents in the retail industry (including Walmart, Target, Amazon, etc...) are not simply good at providing the items we want at a lower cost but they are also very good at deciding which things we have access to and which we do not.  Now, to be sure, there are ways around this but those ways require extra effort and a more considered shopper.  Half the time Amazon or one of the big retailers is a choice precisely because they have it, will ship it, and can get it to you yesterday.  It would seem that because they can do this, we as Americans seem to be okay with their parental choices over what it is on which we spend our money.  Why doesn't the media jump on this?  Because Amazon is in the same small club of powerful influencers as the media is.  Furthermore, the consolidation of the publishing industry and particularly the religious publishing industry under the umbrella of these same companies has the same effect upon Christian publishing.  It is not simply a question of getting words onto a published page but having a market open to those books.