American Booksellers Association and Abigail Shrier

[lionheart]

Sorry if there is already a thread--I couldn't find it.

@lionheart

The Coddling of the American Mind has some answers.

That's been on my To Read list for a while.

@Bambooshoot

Thanks for this - just bought the book!

Me too.

So how many extra sales is that? Counting mine I make it 6 of us mentioning a purchase.

Nothing like banning a book to make people eager to get their hands on a copy!

“What bookstores do at their best is provoke conversations and look at things outside their normal comfort zone. That’s what good books do, and what good bookstores do,” said Robert Sindelar, managing partner of Third Place Books and president of the American Booksellers Association Board of Directors.

The irony. The sheer fucking irony. And now they're talking about sending out a particular book as an act of serious violence. How do people this stupid even function on a day to day basis? How do they brush their teeth and do up their shoelaces, let alone rise to positions of seniority?

LOL www.regnery.com/custom/irreversible-damage/

Its up to #7 on the US amazon chart. It must be selling thousands

got the Kindle version. Much safer.

Don’t be so sure! What if the influence of That Book is so strong that it starts to infect the other books in your library? Just think of the danger, one moment you could be reading a cosy crime thriller and suddenly radical feminism starts to animate the characters. The horror, the horror

#3 now

I wonder if the New York Times bestseller list will be fixed so she doesn’t appear. NYT is pro TRA I think?

Did the ABA apology only happen yesterday? If so she will probably have more media appearances to come and will sell even more.

Day before yesterday, sorry.

It’s a great book. I got the audible book. Very enlightening and concerning. I would recommend to anyone interested in this topic.

got the Kindle version. Much safer.

I heard somewhere that if Amazon remove from sale they will take it off your device.

Without a refund?

@UtopiaPlanitia

The overblown wording of some of the public statements, released by organisations and individuals accused of insufficient wokeness, in recent years often put me in mind of confessions made during struggle sessions in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. I don’t think this frenetic finger-pointing can be sustainable and may well provoke a backlash when society has had enough. There are better, more consensual ways to effect change in liberal democracies.

Precisely.

I taught a module last year to undergrads about the Cultural Revolution in China. So much of it is being mirrored in society today.

I listened to the In Our Time programme on the cultural revolution not long ago. It very much put me in mind of this particular social phenomenon. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000q9b6. It was very interesting.

@PaterPower

I bought the book earlier today.

Unfortunately via Amazon, who I note had been petitioned by some of their employees to ban it (result being no ban, but they promised they wouldn’t promote it).

Could anyone recommend a good alternative bookseller for this kind of purchase?

I got mine from Amazon but when they banned the Ryan T Anderson book When Harry Became Sally I managed to track down a copy through Waterstones. It was about ten days from ordering to receiving.

WH Smiths took the order but then cancelled it without an explanation.

We are not near any independent book sellers unfortunately.

@Ereshkigalangcleg

got the Kindle version. Much safer.

I heard somewhere that if Amazon remove from sale they will take it off your device.

I worry about this, so I try to make sure I can get an actual, physical copy of the book if it's got any hint of cancel culture wafting about it.

If they want those books back then Jeff will have to come and fight me for them.

snoopy if you order through the likes of Hive they will deliver as well. You could nominate any bookshop I guess.

@NewlyGranny

So how many extra sales is that? Counting mine I make it 6 of us mentioning a purchase.

Nothing like banning a book to make people eager to get their hands on a copy!

I've actually started a project of buying banned books or authors who are being targeted by cancel culture.

It didn't start out to be particularly focused on feminist or gender-critical books but it's taken quite a steep curve in that direction recently.

It's been very interesting through, a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, quote a range of subjects and genres, and I try to print of a couple of articles about why the book or author has been targeted for banning or cancellation to go with the book, usually the article that brought the book to my attention is the first one to be printed with it.

If it's more an author being cancelled than any one of their books (for example being dropped from an event or a panel, like Amanda Craig or Milli Hill) I will pick a couple of their books at random and add them to the ever growing collection with an explanation about why I've included them.

I've got a fun app which allows me to spy on books on Amazon. I've looked at this book on American Amazon, and at the moment it's selling over 13,000 copies a month. On UK Amazon, it's well over 1,000 a month.

Second apology.

Oh my good god!!! What are they thinking? They won’t recover from this. Idiots.

🤮

I do hope Alison has ordered herself a hair shirt.

How low can they crawl? How abjectly can they abase themselves? Don't they understand that their grovel is meaningless, ill-judged, and will never be sufficient for the ideologues?

Yes, getting the cover image wrong was negligent, but that's all they needed to say: it was negligent and the result was offensive. We apologise, and will examine our systems to ensure it does not happen again.

I don't want to compare this to the Cultural Revolution, because I don't want to minimise the truly terrible suffering of a nation of people, the genuine violence inflicted upon them in the name of Righthink, but the similarities...