The latest controversy burning up the Internet is the availability of Phillip Greaves' book, The Pedophile's Guide to Love & Pleasure, which he self-published and was available on Amazon. No, we are not making this up, and yes, you could have gotten it through your Kindle. Customers went crazy and threatened to boycott Amazon unless it removed the offering, which Amazon eventually did. The book is described as an "attempt to make pedophile situations safer for those juveniles … by establishing certain rules for these adults to follow," which attracted more than 800 angry customer comments. After the book attracted those complaints and coverage in TechCrunch and all of the morning news shows, sales skyrocketed, until Amazon finally pulled the plug. According to Slate.com, the advice book was the 158,221st best-selling e-book on Amazon. After TechCrunch covered the book, it skyrocketed to 146th — "an increase of over 101,000 percent in less than a day," Gawker's Adrian Chen notes. It reached 65th place before Amazon pulled it from the site. Yikes! People are up in arms about the book and are questioning whether Amazon, which initially refused to pull the book, should have stricter guidelines for filtering what it sells. The bigger question to us is why so many copies have been sold. Forget Amazon — what does that say about us?
Read more at Slate.com.