I decided to break this into parts because no one wants to read that much and really these issues are not quite the same. One of the points of debate on the issue of the Roman McClay books was whose responsibility it was monitor such a thing. The argument was essentially that it wasn’t so much that these books should be banned, but that Amazon shouldn’t be the vehicle for them. This is not the first time that Amazon has pulled books and it certainly won’t be the last.

While I retain some level of anonymity, I would like to point out that have had a few books published in my lifetime. I’m certainly not as prolific as some of our commenters and regular readers and the books haven’t been successful. In fact, that is what led me to Amazon to self-publish my last work. See, ADP (Amazon Direct Publishing) offers the lowest costs to authors and so I was guaranteed a profit (even if small) for the first time in my publishing life.

This is paramount as it pertains to issues of regulating taste and content. Traditional publishers have gatekeepers that monitor this throughout the publishing process. One publisher took my original book idea, threw it out, and asked me to write a new one based on a single chapter from the original. Others edited or revised the content slightly depending on the situation. Amazon did not edit my work. Amazon did not make suggestions for changes. As far as I was concerned, I was completely on my own. Naturally, this made the process much easier and cheaper to me, but it also made it more difficult in terms of limiting errors. Like most writers, making the occasional error is unavoidable, but finding those errors is more difficult when you are looking at your own work.

A friend on another site suggested that Amazon should be responsible for monitoring their site for offensive material. This sounds great, but I’m not sure if he knew exactly what he was suggesting. Amazon would need to hire quite a few gatekeepers to review material before it gets published. They would either have the power to say yes or no or they could have the additional power to recommend changes. At that point, Amazon ceases to be a self-publishing company. They become a traditional publishing house and those gatekeepers would need to be paid somehow. Those additional costs would be passed on to the authors.

The current system relies on consumers to alert Amazon to problems when they see them. They could then remove such items in a similar way that Twitter and Facebook reviews questionable tweets/posts once they are flagged as either abusive and/or misleading. Of course, Amazon has the further issue of supporting fiction and nonfiction content. It is one thing to take an informational tweet or post and tag it as abusive, offensive, or misleading. It’s another to take a work of fiction and do the same.

In that sense, Amazon serves as a platform and not a traditional publishing house. Traditional publishing houses actively control the content they release to the public. Amazon obviously does not, but clearly they have shown some restraint after the fact. This is clearly where some folks misunderstand how free speech works. Everyone has freedom of speech. Platforms have the freedom to determine if they want to amplify that speech or not. Everyone gets the right to say what they want to say. No one has an absolute right to a microphone. They also don’t have the right to restrict people’s reactions to their speech.

Lyndon McLeod wrote two books that were available on Amazon. They were ostensibly fiction and penned under the name of Roman McClay. He then went out and killed five people in almost identical fashion to what was mentioned in the books.

Situations like these raise many questions and we can’t possibly tackle them all in one post, so we will focus on one at a time. The first question is whether this even qualifies as art. This is where we have to be careful and show our work as the math teachers used to tell us. A book about killing other people is not unique. Hell, shows like “Dexter” and “Hannibal” have famously pushed those boundaries and that’s just two prominent examples.

So, what is the difference between those books/movies/shows and these two books here? It can’t be that those books didn’t inspire a crime spree. That’s an extremely low and convenient bar to clear. Besides, that’s not specific enough. “Grand Theft Auto” has had any number of iterations and people still steal cars. One could argue that the video game glorifies the act. In fact, I’m sure they have, but those video games are still in circulation.

So, the question before us is what differentiates these two books about killing left-leaning politicians and people and those books. movies, and shows? I would say the difference comes in the specificity of the subject matter. Dexter and Hannibal Lecter are fictional characters that harm other fictional characters. The story lines are exactly that: story lines.

Amazon took the books down yesterday. A search on their website won’t yield any results for these two books and even say that anything by him is unavailable. Obviously, this was based on a public outcry and the problem of a mass murderer profiting off books that described his crimes. The public has every right to protest such a thing, but one has to wonder where we draw the line.

I normally detest the slippery slope argument. It’s lazy and misleading. Yet, in this case I see the impulse. If the so-called woke crowd pulls these books then where does it stop? This is a valid question that has little to do with left and right. At the same time that liberals and progressives are protesting these books, conservatives protest books they don’t like. They want to force libraries not to carry books and art they object to. It really is about whether we put guardrails around the marketplace of ideas or not.

I would go back to the specific subject matter of these two books. The author fantasizes about killing specific people that exist in reality. That somehow blurs the line between art and reality. It is incumbent on those that want to take a book out of circulation to articulate the precise reasons why. It has to move beyond a matter of taste. A free society can be messy. The marketplace of ideas is not always tidy and respectable.

Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart once famously said he could not define pornography but he “knew it when he saw it.” The definition of politically inspired revenge porn might fall under the same category. We can’t provide an exact definition, but we know it when we see it. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it must be a duck. These two books are most definitely quacking.