Thursday, January 09, 2014

Well, This is Certainly Discouraging

Guess what's making a comeback thanks to e-books?  If you guessed Mein Kampf, you win.

I just checked Amazon's Kindle listings where you can find Der Fuhrer's handiwork in more than 10-editions.  You may choose among the "special banned edition," the "1939 illustrated edition," the "Ford translation" edition, a few German-language editions, and the "complete and unabridged, fully annotated" edition.

For the record, I'm not a big believer in censorship but I find this wave of popularity of this e-book just a bit creepy.  But, if you do buy it electronically, don't think someone won't be noticing.  Everything you download these days is logged somewhere.

Writing on the website Vocativ.com, author and journalist Faraone claims that "more than a dozen free English-language versions of Mein Kampf have been downloaded in excess of 100,000 times from the nonprofit Internet Archive alone", while paid-for e-versions are outselling Glenn Beck on iTunes and entering the charts on Amazon.com - with a 99-cent version currently topping the retailer's propaganda and political psychology chart .

In the UK, an ebook of Mein Kampf, retailing for 99p, tops Amazon.co.uk's propaganda and spin chart and its fascism and Nazism chart, and sits in second place in its political science and ideology bestseller list.

Another 99-cent version, from publisher Elite Minds, sits in 11th place in Amazon.com's World War II charts. "Sales are great," publisher Michael Ford, told Faraone, admitting to the "moral dilemma" he would face if he were to promote the book and advocate "something that could be misused". "I have not heavily promoted the book and decided, for the most part, to let it spread among those who have a true historical and academic interest naturally," said Ford.

10 comments:

gingersnap said...

Wonder if, Harper will get rid of that book?

Owen Gray said...

There seems to be an expanding market for insanity these days.

Dana said...

Tim Berners Lee must have a few sleepless nights now and then.

The Mound of Sound said...

Ginger, be reasonable. Who gives up an autographed first edition?

Dana, that's Sir Tim to the likes of you.

Owen, that market isn't expanding. It's always been infinite.

karen said...

It may be because of a movie and book. The Book Thief was recently made into a movie. It is a young adult novel about a little girl in a town outside Munich whose stepparents hide a Jewish man. In the book (and I would suppose the movie, though I haven't seen it) the Jewish man carries a copy of Mein Kempf to look German. Later in the story he paints over all the pages and writes a story for the little girl. The Book Thief is not sympathetic to Hitler, nor is it apologetic for the banal evil done in Germany, but Mein Kempf shows up in a few places. It gives the impression that Mein Kempf is one of the few books Germans are allowed to have.

The Mound of Sound said...

I've not heard of that, Karen. Thanks.

karen said...

It seems kind of weird to me that the Guardian article reports this increase, but doesn't even seem to wonder why.

The Mound of Sound said...

I expect it would be pretty hard to identify individuals who order books online to interview them.

Anonymous said...

So the only High Priests can read certain seminal material?
Get a grip, Mound.
Are going to the movies or just reading reviews?
Any person with a reasonable amount of grey matter between ears should be entitled to see it for himself or herself.
Not that read it, yet ;-)
A..non

e.a.f. said...

it maybe the movie, it maybe that economic and social conditions are once again ripe for such politics.

as the working and middle class becomes poorer and the rich become richer, and people see that working hard and playing by the rules isn't working, they go looking for what may work.

People don't want to accept that their living conditions are the result of how they voted. they want to blame someone else.