In case you were in some sort of cave that didn’t have WiFi access today you may have missed out on the big story of the day which was Amazon’s defense of a book in it’s catalog called “The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure”.

In case you’re wondering if the book is really a “how to” for pedophiles, it is. The author of the book said in an interview with CNN, “Penetration is out. You can’t do that with a child, but kissing and fondling I don’t think is that big of a problem,” he said.

And here’s the author’s actual description of the book (I am purposely not mentioning the author’s name anywhere in this post):

“This is my attempt to make pedophile situations safer for those juveniles that find themselves involved in them, by establishing certian 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 sentences should they ever be caught.”

Apparently not only is he a pedophile, he’s fucking illiterate or doesn’t own a spell-checker either.

Amazon issued a statement defending its position saying, “Amazon believes it is censorship not to sell certain books simply because we or others believe their message is objectionable,” it reads. “Amazon does not support or promote hatred or criminal acts, however, we do support the right of every individual to make their own purchasing decisions.”

Well Amazon may be all about free speech but they’re also about the bottom line. Twitter literally exploded with thousands of Tweets and calls for boycotting Amazon. #BoycottAmazon was a trending topic on Twitter much of the day, along with Tweets including Amazon’s phone number asking people to call and have the book removed.

A little after midnight the book was removed and mommy blogger Jessica Gottlieb actually spoke to a representative from Amazon who apologized for their original decision to keep the book up. The Amazon employee said, “We are working on ways to get the whole thing off our site. Rest assured nothing like this will happen again.”

Clearly we saw the power of social media at work today and, at least in my opinion, it was for a good cause. While the man may have the right to say what’s on his mind, Amazon doesn’t have any obligation to uphold that right by including his book in their catalog. I think they finally got the picture.

Social media 1 – Amazon 0.