“Should Amazon.co.uk sell The Protocols and other controversial works? As a bookseller, Amazon.co.uk strongly believes that people have the right to choose their own reading material. Our goal is to support freedom of expression and to provide customers with the broadest selection possible so they can find, discover, and buy any title they might be seeking. That selection includes some titles which many people, including many employees of Amazon.co.uk, may find distasteful or otherwise objectionable. However, Amazon.co.uk believes it is censorship to make a book unavailable to our customers because we believe its message to be repugnant.

Furthermore, because we strongly believe that the appropriate response to repugnant speech is not censorship, but more speech, we will continue to allow readers, authors, and publishers to express their views about the books and other products we offer on our Web site.”

Couldn’t have put it better myself.

Johnathon – you may not have explicitly called it a free speech issue but several others in this comment thread have.

It is certainly an intimidation issue, the intimidation of one of America’s most well-known brands by religious nutjobs. If that is not worth making a fuss about, I don’t know what is.

I don’t know where people get this idea that libertarians must never criticise the actions of a business. It is possible to respect the right of a business to do X, but still also make harsh criticisms of X. A vital, but all-too-often ignored distinction.

Verity – stop preaching and let the straw men sleep.

Cowtipping is a long established midwest dairyland tradition. My dad told me of it as a child. To avoid spoiling any plots (in both senses of the word) let me just say, if ever invited to go cowtipping, approach it with an open mind, watch were you step, and if you want to see sparks, pee on an electric fence.

However, unless you’re going to compel bookshops to carry specific books or issues of periodicals, or alternatively compel them not to carry them, it really has to be accepted that the decision is one for the bookshop to make, and them alone

Absolutely, and I do accept that Borders can do what it likes, just as they must accept that people like me, Dale Amon and others will take their custom elsewhere in dismay and disgust. It would of course be idiotic to force Borders to carry such books or magazines.

That firm will have to live the consequences of its actions.