Victory! Amazon.com Pulls Pedophile Guide from Kindle Store

Less than 24 hours after their defense of a Kindle book entitled The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure caused a national outcry, Amazon.com has quietly pulled the book from its e-shelves. Thanks to the over 500 Change.org members who were part of making that happen.

Initially, Amazon defended their sale of the book as part of their corporate policy against censorship. They claimed that because the book contained no graphic depictions of child rape, it could not be considered child pornography. And legally, they were right. But in reality, the book was much worse. It was an instruction manual on how to molest children aimed at facilitating a horrific crime. Here's the product description:

This is my attempt to make pedophile situations safer for those juveniles that find themselves involved in them, by establishing certain rules for these adults to follow. I hope to achieve this by appealing to the better nature of pedosexuals, with hope that their doing so will result in less hatred and perhaps liter [sic] sentences should they ever be caught.

This isn't the first time public pressure has caused Amazon to stop selling an objectionable product. In 2009, the site was the target of outrage over a video game called Rapelay, where the protagonist's goal was to stalk and rape women. And back in 2002, they pulled another book for pedophiles, celebrating sexual relationships between adult men and young boys.

So far Amazon has made no public statements about whether they pulled the book intentionally or why, but it is no longer available from the website. However, it managed to break the Amazon Kindle store's Top 100 at #96 before being pulled, a huge jump from its previous rating of #158,221. So the negative press probably drove up the traffic to the tome. But a million outraged people clicking on the book and eventually pressuring Amazon into removing it is far better than a few thousand using it as intended — to molest children.

Thanks to everyone who signed the petition and helped ensure this swift victory!

Photo credit: mccun934