It’s surprising how many ways our society has invented to control free speech. There are strong protections for free speech, but they are no match for the endless ways we can all be silenced.
For those like me who are professional authors, there are Internet firms who function as aggregators. If you upload your manuscript to them, they will digitally format it for you and then distribute it to forty-plus online services such as Spotify, iTunes, Kobo, Barnes and Noble and others.
This seemed like a good idea so I uploaded my manuscript to the Internet site, and it was immediately rejected by Apple, Baker & Taylor, Barnes & Noble, Bibliotheca, BorrowBox, Everand, Gardners, Hoopla, Kobo, Odilo, OverDrive, Palace Marketplace, Smashwords, Tolino and Vivlio—all websites that sell digital books. The reason I was given was that they objected to the references I made to a company who is also in the business of digital books—Amazon Inc. They asked me to rewrite my manuscript, so it did not refer to any company in the same business as theirs. Interestingly, they all had the same rule!
The origin of the word competition is the Latin, competere, which means “to strive together”. We have since made it mean almost the opposite—an expression of separateness, polarization, vilification, aggression and a violation of free speech.
This kind of paranoia represents the very worst of our competitive urges. It is behavior that doesn’t fit with my own values and so I have declined the opportunity to publish with this organization, thus establishing a self-imposed limitation on distribution of my latest book.
How are you censored and how do you rise above these efforts to silence you? Share your examples of others attempting to silence you and how you pushed back.
In earlier days, we radio hosts were sometimes forbidden from talking about other media as if our listeners would then assume they didn’t exist! Imagine being banned from talking about last night’s episode of Seinfeld that most of the continent had seen. How small-minded and unrealistic of Barnes & Noble et al to reject your book on that basis.
Small-minded is exactly right. Paranoid too. What if the leader of the Toronto Symphony said, “You are not allowed to name any other symphony out loud!” How ridiculous might that be?
That is both disgusting and scary. A subtle (or not so subtle) form of discrimination and censorship. So much for freedom of speech . . .
Thanks for raising this, Lance. Wish you hadn’t had to, though.
David the law is pretty clear, but we have found hundreds of ways to separate and discriminate. Any conversation about DEI is moot – even hypocritical – for people who do this sort of thing for a living!