Consumers threaten to boycott Amazon over pedophile book

Amazon.com Inc. is selling a self-published guide that offers advice to pedophiles, and that has generated outrage on the Internet and threats to boycott the retailer.

The availability of "The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure: a Child-lover's Code of Conduct" calls into question whether Amazon has any procedures - or even an obligation - to vet books before they are sold in its online stores. Amazon did not respond to multiple e-mail and phone messages.

The title is an electronic book available for Amazon's Kindle e-reader and the company's software for reading Kindle books on mobile phones and computers. Amazon allows authors to submit their own works and shares revenue with them.

Amazon issues guidelines banning certain materials, including those deemed offensive. But the company doesn't elaborate on what constitutes offensive content.

The author of "The Pedophile's Guide," listed as Philip R. Greaves II, argues that pedophiles are misunderstood, as the word literally means to love a child. He adds that it is only a crime to act on sexual impulses toward children, and offers advice that purportedly allows pedophiles to abide by the law.

Many users on Twitter called on Amazon to pull the book, and a few threatened to boycott the retailer until it does.

Child online safety advocacy group Enough is Enough says it isn't surprised that someone would publish such a book, but believes Amazon should remove it. It says the book lends the impression child abuse is normal.

Christopher Finan, president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, counters that Amazon has the right under the First Amendment to sell any book that is not child pornography or legally obscene. Finan said Greaves' book doesn't amount to either.