From here:

The e-book, authored by Phillips Greaves, was published late last month, according to product details on Amazon.com. It sells for $4.79 on the company’s Kindle Store.

“This is my attempt to make pedophile situations safer for those juveniles that find themselves involved in them, by establishing certian [sic] rules for these adults to follow,” a product description reads. “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.”

Amazon is standing by the decision to sell the e-book.

“Amazon believes it is censorship not to sell certain books simply because we or others believe their message is objectionable,” the company said in a written statement. “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.”

In the last month or so the book has had 1737 consumer reviews on Amazon, 1688 of them negative. I rather doubt that most of the reviewers have actually read the book, but this might be a rare occasion when judging a book by its cover isn’t such a bad idea.

Our civilisation has reached a grubbily sordid point when a vendor of books feels the need to appeal to the evils of censorship to justify publishing a how-to for pedophiles by a barely literate imbecile.

I generally dislike slippery slope arguments, but this all started when I was a teenager and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was the subject of an obscenity trial. The book was deemed not obscene by the jury – partly because it was thought to have literary merit; the jury was wrong on both counts. I was delighted at the time since it meant I could get my hands on a copy. Lady Chatterley was rapidly followed by Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, Nexus, Plexus and Sexus – all of which I devoured with considerable interest; even then I noticed Miller’s books were marginally more literate than Lawrence’s,  although that was not what had initially piqued my interest in them.

Since then, of course, our pornography has not needed redeeming features of any sort and we have – I hesitate to say struck bottom – reached a nadir: Pedophilia for Dummies.

Update: Within the last hour or so (it’s 11:19 p.m. EST), Amazon has removed the book from its site. When it was there, it looked like this: