Amazon Takes Out the Trash

We're happy to report that Amazon took action overnight to remove the "Buy" button for an abomination of an ebook -- a so-called "pedophile's guide" -- from its website. The book had risen to the top 150 in the Kindle Store sales rankings, fired in large part by curiosity sparked by the threat of a customer boycott and about 3,000 one-star reviews. I've long been an ardent opponent of censorship, but slippery slope or not, there is absolutely no place for this book in an open-access retail environment for innumerable reasons that have been stated eloquently already by many others. --S.W.