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Hear. Hear. I still can’t fathom why line spacing isn’t adjustable in the iBooks app. If they can’t even do that how little do they care about books?

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Nothing special in that. The high-tech companies hate to pay employees. They’d rather have computers do things. I seem to recall Amazon, years ago, making a similarly automated rejection of some competitor’s name that was so crudely done the mention wasn’t even about that competitor.

This is the sort of nonsense you get when companies move into a field without understanding its particular ethos, meaning ways of looking at the world. Barnes & Noble knows that ethos. It publishes their own titles, but it also understands the publishing ethos means it should not to get all hot and bothered when someone else’s books include a promotion of them as a publisher. It understands the line between a publisher and a retailer. The publisher controls the content. The retailer just sells.
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Neither Amazon nor Apple understand that ethos. They want to play the game in such a way that they ‘have their cake and eat it too.’ Both want to be able to demand the removal of content they dislike, including any mention of competitors. Sorry, but that’s the right of publishers (i.e. editors) but not retailers. On the other hand, they don’t want to be sued for content that might be libelous, something that does happen to publishers but not retailers.

You see the same ‘have and don’t have’ mindset with other tech companies such as Facebook. Facebook clearly wants to kick off those who politics it doesn’t like and to do so even though those people are doing nothing remotely illegal. It also wants to keep others who’re on far more doubtful ground because it likes their politics. And yet at the same time Facebook doesn’t want to face quite legitimate lawsuits for what some users say. Legally, you can’t pick and choose. If you take on the role of authorizing participants, tossing out some, then you must also take responsibility for those you implicitly authorize by not expelling.

Incidentally, that’s why Facebook and their kin want the government to take over the role of deciding who can post to Facebook and who cannot. They want the results without the consequences. They fail to grasp that ‘the government decides’ is the very essence of censorship.

In Anglo-American law we fought a long battle to end the requirement that the king had a right to authorize publishers or not. And unfortunately that’s a right that’s being constantly nibbled away in countries like the UK, which lack a written First Amendment. In the UK you can say also sorts of nasty things about Baptists, Catholics and Jews, but if you merely quote the Koran and stress its clear meaning, the police make come a knocking. Here’s an example.

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2017/08/uk-police-warn-man-to-stop-criticizing-islam-on-facebook

Search for “UK policing criticism of Islam” for numerous other examples. You see the same cowering mindset in a host of other areas. High-tech companies really are cowards. The Clock app on iPhones places Gaza, a brutally repressive, terrorist state, in the “Palestinian Territories” but refuses to place majority Jerusalem in democratic Israel. It also lists cities in occupied Tibet as being in China but refuses to place Taipei, the capital of free and democratic Taiwan in Taiwan. Spineless, gutless cowards. And yeah, it is all about the money.
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When I was about twelve, I had the first hint of my political leanings while reading Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. I got ticked off that Asimov seemed to assume that ordinary people had no business running a society, that a shadowy ‘scientific’ elite could do better. A lot of high-tech executives apparently think like Asimov. They prefer for societies to be run by a select few. That’s why they want online posting, whether in China or the U.S. to be dictated by the government.

And linking back to this incident, it’s why Amazon and Apple want to tell authors what they are or are not permitted to say in their books. They think they know better. It’s that Asimov fallicy again.

That I loathe in all its manifestations. Like Thomas Jefferson, I believe that, “The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”

–Michael W. Perry, editor of Dachau Liberated

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