Some time back, I mentioned that Amazon had developed a draconian new policy for its advertisements, forbidding ads for any books that feature firing guns or guns held by children on the cover. At the time, I said this was clearly an attempt to go after indie creators, and that Amazon would never enforce such a policy against, say, Japanese manga.
I was wrong.
In fact, it’s worse than that: Amazon isn’t just removing ads but removing books. Whole light-novel and manga series have been deleted from the platform silently and without explanation.
Several outlets have now reported on this, including Crunchyroll, Anime News Network, AniTAY, and Comicbook.com. Several translator-publishers have likewise announced the removal of their books.
Sadly, we have confirmed with Amazon that they have opted to remove our No Game No Life titles from their platform.
Happily, there are other retailers, both physical and digital, that are thrilled to help you support for these titles in the form of cash exchanged for goods! pic.twitter.com/xDbXGFvyBs
— Yen Press (@yenpress) July 14, 2020
This is apparently not limited to the U.S. Amazon but affects all Amazon portals outside Japan. Some of the publishers affected are fairly big players, too, including Yen Press and Darkhorse.
As Crunchyroll reports, publishers have tried to get in contact with Amazon to get the reasons for delisting, and Amazon has been less than forthcoming:
Pinansky said that despite multiple attempts over the last few months to get in contact with anyone on a review team at Kindle through email, they rang the support phone line and requested support tickets, doing so 10 or 12 times. “Phone support has no power to override or obtain any further information from Kindle Content Review.” Though all J-Novel Club got in response from Amazon after multiple nine-day waits are a generic email …
Because Amazon is not being transparent, we are left to speculate. The most likely reason is that Amazon is going after lolicon, and while such a purge would include a few of the titles that have been removed, some other, considerably tamer books are being removed as well. Someone in my mentions (no doubt with some exaggeration) said they were removing most anything that has a cute girl on the cover.
Most of what’s being purged, being light novels, is isekai, and while I personally dislike isekai, this censorship is still troubling: If they can throw these off the platform, they can start removing content for considerably more tenuous reasons.
“They came for the lolicons, and I did not speak out because I was not a child molestor,” and so forth.
