Free Republic

Ditching Amazon Prime and looking for alternative websites to purchase things. For example, I now get most of my clothing directly from LL Bean. What is a good place to buy books online? I still buy a lot of books. An obvious choice is Barnes & Noble but looking to see if there are any other book-buying websites I should be aware of.

Amazon has adopted a rule against books that contain anything the company labels as “hate speech.” It appears there was no announcement of the new rule. It was only noticed by media after the online retailer recently banned a book that criticizes transgender ideology. It’s not clear what Amazon means by “hate speech” or even if it used that label to drop that particular book. In general parlance, Americans hold widely diverging views on what constitutes hate speech, a 2017 Cato poll found. Some tech platforms describe it as speech that disparages people based on characteristics such as race, gender,...

Christian authors who once identified as gay or lesbian are highlighting the double standard Amazon is applying by removing their books from the platform while continuing to sell titles that promote pedophilia. Restored Hope Network Executive Director Anne Paulk and pastoral counselor Joe Dallas both saw their books removed from the retail giant. Amazon told some authors that their books, which detail how Jesus transformed their lives and sexual identities, were in "violation of our content guidelines." Paulk, the author of Restoring Sexual Identity: Hope for Women Who Struggle with Same-Sex Attraction, said in a statement to The Christian Post...

...For much of the last year, mainstream novelists were furious that Amazon was discouraging the sale of some titles in its confrontation with the publisher Hachette over e-books. Now self-published writers, who owe much of their audience to the retailer’s publishing platform, are unhappy. One problem is too much competition. But a new complaint is about Kindle Unlimited, a new Amazon subscription service that offers access to 700,000 books — both self-published and traditionally published — for $9.99 a month. It may bring in readers, but the writers say they earn less. And in interviews and online forums, they have...

Amazon frightened many conservative authors this week in a mass deletion of reviews. Some authors lost almost 100 reviews on their published works. Others lost all the reviews they had ever written on Amazon. Some lost both. Information about the purge began to trickle out in the closed Conservative Libertarian Fiction Alliance (CLFA) Facebook group. Member after member began reporting the losses at the same time. Marina Fontaine, whose credits include the dystopian Chasing Freedom, the pro-Trump fiction anthology MAGA 2020, and moderating the CLFA page, reported many members experiencing losses. A coordinated effort was launched to contact Amazon for...