Yesterday I started writing a review of The God Species by Mark Lynas, and posted a brief comment about it here. I noticed that Amazon had an odd message saying the book (but not the Kindle edition) was unavailable because of a customer complaint that the item was “not as described.” It did cross my mind that this was a trick by a disgruntled environmentalist unhappy about the book’s pragmatic recommendations. Today, Mark Lynas and a rapidly growing number of people on Twitter have woken up to the apparent censorship, unwitting or not, by Amazon. Martin Robbins in The Guardian points out that maybe there was a faulty print run, but if so Amazon have not told the author or publisher about the problem, and nor are they responding to journalists’ calls or the Twitter snowball so far today.

So, without pre-empting my review, I’ll say it’s well worth reading the book if you’re at all interested in sustainability, and it’s available from Waterstones and Blackwells. Mark Lynas himself has commented on the affair.

This is, of course, if it proves to be effective censorship, a good example of the kind of consumer detriment caused by the increasing re-concentration of the book retailing market. When I was on the Competition Commission inquiry into this market a few years ago, Amazon was the competitive upstart which effectively persuaded us that Waterstones and Ottakars should be permitted to merge. Online dynamics mean that Amazon has become the incumbent with market power by now. Time for consumers to diversify to other online retailers – or indeed back to physical bookstores?