The retailer once said it would sell “the good, the bad and the ugly.” Now it has banished objectionable volumes — and agreed to erasing the swastikas from a photo book about a Nazi takeover, according to David Streitfeld from the NY Times… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Amazon is quietly canceling its Nazis.

Over the past 18 months, the retailer has removed two books by David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as several titles by George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party. Amazon has also prohibited volumes like “The Ruling Elite: The Zionist Seizure of World Power” and “A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind.”

While few may lament the disappearance of these hate-filled books, the increasing number of banished titles has set off concern among some of the third-party booksellers who stock Amazon’s vast virtual shelves. Amazon, they said, seems to operate under vague or nonexistent rules.

“Amazon reserves the right to determine whether content provides an acceptable experience,” said one recent removal notice that the company sent to a bookseller.

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been roiled in recent years by controversies that pit freedom of speech against offensive content. Amazon has largely escaped this debate. But with millions of third-party merchants supplying much of what Amazon sells to tens of millions of customers, that ability to maintain a low profile may be reaching its end.

Amazon began as a bookstore and, even as it has moved on to many more lucrative projects, now controls at least two-thirds of the market for new, used and digital volumes in the United States. With its profusion of reader reviews, ability to cut prices without worrying about profitability and its control of the electronic book landscape, to name only three advantages, Amazon has immense power to shape what information people are consuming.

Yet the retailer declines to provide a list of prohibited books, say how they were chosen or even discuss the topic. “Booksellers make decisions every day about what selection of books they choose to offer,” it said in a statement.

Read full post at The New York Times

Many successful authors had jobs before writing full time, and some continue to work non-literary jobs even after being published, according to Mariela Santos Muñiz from BookRiot… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Some bestselling authors were teachers or professors of different subjects. Not surprisingly though, it seems like English and writing were among the most frequently taught:

Rick Riordan

Riordan was a middle school teacher before writing popular books like Percy Jackson & the Olympians series and the Magnus Chase series, to name a few.

According to his website, he taught English and History in California and Texas for 15 years. “Uncle Rick,” as some fans call him, began writing adult books while he taught; then Riordan wrote the first Percy Jackson book – a story for one of his children.

He predominantly writes middle grade books. Currently a full-time writer, some of his books have been turned into movies, and The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson, Book 1) has been turned into a musical. Riordan is also an important part of the Rick Riordan Presents imprint, which features books by underrepresented middle grade authors.

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Dan Brown

Brown is the author of adult bestsellers like The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons, and Origin, all part of the Robert Langdon series.

Several of those books have been adapted into movies, with actor Tom Hanks taking on the titular role.

Before his bestselling success, Dan Brown taught at Phillip Exeter Academy – his alma mater. He was a teacher of English and creative writing, per Britannica, and Brown’s father had been a math teacher there too. According to his website, it was during this time that the author became interested in science and religion, which are huge parts of his stories.

After teaching, Brown went on to write full time, and still dedicates his time to writing.

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Alice Walker

A poet and author of fiction and nonfiction, “Alice Walker has been defined as one of the key international writers of the 20th century. Walker made history as the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Literature as well as the National Book Award in 1983 for her novel The Color Purple,” according to PBS.

The Color Purple was made into a movie starring actors like Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover, and Oprah Winfrey.

Other works include The Temple of my Familiar, Her Blue Body Everything We Know, Meridian, and The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart, and The Chicken Chronicles.

At one point after graduating from college, moving to Mississippi, and joining the civil rights movement, Walker worked as a teacher, per Britannica. She was already writing during this time period.

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Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison wrote books such as Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Sula. Beloved was turned into a movie with actors Danny Glover, Thandie Newton, and more.

Among her many notable achievements, she won a Pulitzer Prize; is “the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature,” per Women’s History; and was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In addition to writing, Morrison taught at various colleges including Howard University, and was a Chair at Princeton University.

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Eoin Colfer

Colfer is known for writing books like the Artemis Fowl books and the WARP series. He has mostly written children’s books.

After graduating from college, Colfer worked as an elementary school teacher in Wexford – the town where he was born.

He comes from a family of teachers, according to his website; Colfer’s father was an elementary school teacher, and his mother a drama teacher.

With the success of Artemis Fowl, he stopped teaching and began to write full time, his site says. Most recently, Colfer has written The Fowl Twins book.

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Read full post on BookRiot

After meeting with a group of Latinx activists, Macmillan said it would take steps to “substantially increas[e] Latinx representation across Macmillan, including authors, titles, staff and its overall literary ecosystem”, according to Dorany Pineda from the L.A. Times… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Less than a week after canceling Jeanine Cummins’ entire “American Dirt” book tour and acknowledging “deep inadequacies” in the rollout of its bestseller, the publishing company appears to be making changes, or at least promising them.

A group of Latinx activists met on Monday with officials at Macmillan, the international parent company of Flatiron Books, which published “American Dirt,” to deliberate over steps the publisher could take to increase Latino representation in the industry.

After the meeting, #DignidadLiteraria and Presente.org, an online Latinx organizing group, released a statement detailing the “unprecedented commitments” Macmillan made after the two-hour meeting.

According to the release, the publisher made commitments to “substantially increasing Latinx representation across Macmillan, including authors, titles, staff and its overall literary ecosystem” as well as “developing an action plan to address these objectives within 90 days.” Macmillan also said it would “regroup within 30 days with #DignidadLiteraria and other Latinx groups to assess progress.”

This week, #DignidadLiteraria and its allies will also be organizing action forums in several cities across the country, including a Thursday discussion at Antioch University in Culver City featuring Roxane Gay, Myriam Gurba, Wendy C. Ortiz and Romeo Guzman. The purpose of these panels is “to continue the conversation on Latinos and the publishing industry,” said Roberto Lovato, a writer and co-founder of the hashtag and group that arose in the wake of the outcry.

In a statement to The Times on Tuesday, Flatiron Books confirmed the wording of the agreement, adding that publishers “felt the meeting was quite productive.”

Cummins’ migrant tale “American Dirt” sparked a raging storm of controversy over the past few weeks. Published on Jan. 21, the book has been accused by critics of being a harmful act of cultural appropriation, riddled with cultural inaccuracies and stereotypes about Mexico and the struggles of migrants. It inspired snarky parodies on Twitter and sparked discussions about how far the publishing industry still had to go to represent the diversity of the Latino experience.

Read full post in the L.A. Times

Whether you are someone who finds comfort in information, your curiosity has been piqued by all of the buzz, or you just like being the expert in the room, here are five nonfiction books about pandemics, viruses, and deadly diseases…  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

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Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

by David Quammen

4.7 stars – 641 reviews

Kindle price: $9.61

The next big human pandemic—the next disease cataclysm, perhaps on the scale of AIDS or the 1918 influenza—is likely to be caused by a new virus coming to humans from wildlife. Experts call such an event “spillover” and they warn us to brace ourselves. David Quammen has tracked this subject from the jungles of Central Africa, the rooftops of Bangladesh, and the caves of southern China to the laboratories where researchers work in space suits to study lethal viruses. He illuminates the dynamics of Ebola, SARS, bird flu, Lyme disease, and other emerging threats and tells the story of AIDS and its origins as it has never before been told. Spillover reads like a mystery tale, full of mayhem and clues and questions. When the Next Big One arrives, what will it look like? From which innocent host animal will it emerge? Will we be ready?

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Beating Back the Devil

by Maryn McKenna

4.6 stars – 43 reviews

Kindle price: $13.99

The universal human instinct is to run from an outbreak of disease like Ebola. These doctors run toward it. Their job is to stop epidemics from happening.

They are the disease detective corps of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the federal agency that tracks and tries to prevent disease outbreaks and bioterrorist attacks around the world. They are formally called the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS)—a group founded more than fifty years ago out of fear that the Korean War might bring the use of biological weapons—and, like intelligence operatives in the traditional sense, they perform their work largely in anonymity. They are not household names, but over the years they were first to confront the outbreaks that became known as hantavirus, Ebola, and AIDS. Every day they work to protect us by hunting down the deadly threats that we forget until they dominate our headlines, West Nile virus, anthrax, and SARS among others.

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Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It

by Gina Kolata

4.3 stars – 202 reviews

Kindle price: $7.99

The fascinating, true story of the world’s deadliest disease.

In 1918, the Great Flu Epidemic felled the young and healthy virtually overnight. An estimated forty million people died as the epidemic raged. Children were left orphaned and families were devastated. As many American soldiers were killed by the 1918 flu as were killed in battle during World War I. And no area of the globe was safe. Eskimos living in remote outposts in the frozen tundra were sickened and killed by the flu in such numbers that entire villages were wiped out.

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The Next Pandemic: On the Front Lines Against Humankind’s Gravest Dangers

by Dr. Ali Khan

4.4 stars – 38 reviews

Kindle price: $13.99

During the 2014 Ebola crisis, the public watched with rapt attention as a handful of Americans contracted the deadly fever and were transported to treatment facilities in the United States. We charted the movements of Dr. Craig Spencer, whose three-mile jog and subway ride to a bowling alley became national news, fearing for our lives. Yet the panic far outstripped the reality of the situation; Dr. Spencer survived, and the disease spread no further. The American Ebola outbreak began and ended with two fatalities.

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Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond

by Sonia Shah

4.4 stars – 91 reviews

Kindle price: $9.99

Scientists agree that a pathogen is likely to cause a global pandemic in the near future. But which one? And how?

Over the past fifty years, more than three hundred infectious diseases have either newly emerged or reemerged, appearing in territories where they’ve never been seen before. Ninety percent of epidemiologists expect that one of them will cause a deadly pandemic sometime in the next two generations. It could be Ebola, avian flu, a drug-resistant superbug, or something completely new. While we can’t know which pathogen will cause the next pandemic, by unraveling the story of how pathogens have caused pandemics in the past, we can make predictions about the future.

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The extraordinary life of William Dorsey Swann, the first drag queen who was born into slavery, is being told for the very first time in a new book titled, The House of Swann, according to Valerie Edwards with The Daily Mail… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

According to author, Channing Gerard Joseph, Swann, who was the property of a woman named Ann Murray, fought for queer freedom nearly a century before Stonewall, which has been touted as the beginning of the fight for gay liberation.

Last week, Joseph published an article in The Nation about his book that gave a sneak peek into who Swann was and what he stood for as the first American activist to lead a queer resistance group.

Swann was born in Maryland around 1858. He lived on a plantation in Hancock, Washington County, Maryland, where he endured slavery and racism before falling victim to torture during a stint in jail.

In the 1880s, Swann became ‘the first known person to dub himself a “queen of drag” – or more familiarly, a drag queen,’ Joseph wrote.

There were also other firsts for Swann, who was known as ‘the Queen’ to his friends.

One came in 1896 when he was sentenced to 10 months in jail for ‘keeping a disorderly house’.

At the time, Swann demanded to be pardoned by President Grover Cleveland, but his request was denied.

According to Joseph, Swann was the earliest recorded American to take legal action to defend the queen community.

Read full post on The Daily Mail

The House of Swann: Where Slaves Became Queens will be published in 2021.

Amazon knows more than just what books you’ve read and when – it knows which parts of them you liked the most, according to Kari Paul from The Guardian… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

When Kari Paul requested her personal information from Amazon this month under California’s new privacy law, she received mostly what she expected: her order history, shipping information and customer support chat logs.

But tucked into the dozens of files were also two Excel spreadsheets, more than 20,000 lines each, with titles, time stamps and actions detailing her reading habits on the Kindle app on her iPhone.

She now knows that on 15 February 2019 starting at 4.37pm, she read The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish – a dark novel by Katya Apekina – for 20 minutes and 30 seconds. On 5 January 2019 starting at 6.27pm, she read the apocalypse-thriller Severance by Ling Ma for 31 minutes and 40 seconds. Starting at 2.12pm on 3 November 2018, she read mermaid romance tale The Pisces by Melissa Broder for 20 minutes and 24 seconds.

And Amazon knows more than just what books she has read and when – it also knows which parts of them she liked the most. On 21 May 2019 she highlighted an excerpt from the third installment of the diary of Anaïs Nin, the data shows, and on 23 August 2018 at 11.25 pm, she highlighted an excerpt from Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath. On 27 August 2018, she changed the color of a highlighted portion of that same book.

Other habits tracked included the times she copied excerpts from books into her iPhone’s clipboard and how often she looked up definitions of words in Kindle’s attached dictionary.

Kari already understood Amazon tracks our purchases on its site, our activity across the web, our voice commands, our grocery shopping and our locations. But the extensive tracking of her reading habits – Kari’s most beloved and previously offline hobby – was jarring. Who is this information shared with, what is done with it, and how can it affect her privacy – and the future of the reading experience itself?

Read full post on The Guardian