Amazon posts pirated, counterfeit copy of our Health Hazards of Homosexuality book for sale as Kindle edition. Appeared a month after Amazon banned the real version.

But continues to ban the real version.

Phony “author” claimed he copyrighted it. Amazon dragged their feet taking it down.

Appears to be an inside job at Amazon. But why?

September 29, 2020

Our real book (left) and the pirated, counterfeit version that Amazon posted a month after banning our book.

We’ve all watched as Big Tech has been aggressively banning and de-platforming conservative ideas. And in particular, Amazon, which has a virtual monopoly on book sales, has been removing conservative books from sale. But we’ve never quite seen anything like this.

We recently reported that on July 17, 2020 Amazon suddenly banned our book The Health Hazards of Homosexuality from being carried on its site. It had been printed and sold through Amazon for 3½ years without any problems. From the beginning, they certainly knew what the book contained. Amazon’s book division had worked with us, helping to format the 600-page paperback book. (We also posted a Kindle eBook edition with Amazon which they took down.)

But in July, Amazon abruptly decided that the book contained “offensive content.” No appeal was possible. Our account was blocked, including even the book’s sales and royalty records.

However, after our report came out, we started to get some startling calls and emails from our readers. When people searched for our Health Hazards book on Amazon, they pulled up an eBook entitled The Negative Consequences of Same-Sex Sexual Behavior. Except for the new cover and title, it was essentially a word-for-word copy of our paperback edition of The Health Hazards of Homosexuality! (The Preface was eliminated, some sections were removed, and an altered product description appeared on Amazon.)

Here's how it was advertised on Amazon's website.

Crudely put together

The pirated work was available only as a Kindle online eBook. But it was very crudely put together and did not function properly as an eBook.

The text did not “flow” depending on the type of device or font size you used; each page was a self-contained block (like a physical book page). You could not change the font, highlight any words, or perform a search. None of the endnote links went anywhere. The endnotes chapter was entirely missing.

The table of contents (TOC) was basically a digital image from our Kindle edition, but none of its links to chapters or sections functioned.

Collusion with Amazon?

Usually, creating a Kindle eBook is a fairly involved process that’s much different than creating a printed book. Our own eBook version was slightly different than our paperback version for that reason (more photos and captions, functional links and URLs,  searchability, etc.).

Looking at the content of the plagiarized book, there are strong reasons to believe that the plagiarist used the digital file of our paperback version – which only Amazon and MassResistance had copies of – and attempted to apply that to a Kindle edition.

The evidence? The text and layout were virtually identical to our book’s. The plagiarist made some minor edits: He changed the font, took out our Preface, re-worded some chapter titles, and removed a few chapter sub-titles. (But the deleted chapter sub-titles still appeared in the TOC!) There were non-working links (reference numbers). There were captions without corresponding images.

Compare these images from our paperback and the pirated eBook:

Here's a page from our book ...

... Here's the same page on the pirated book. The font is different and the page break at the bottom is a few lines higher.

The plagiarized book was posted on Amazon on August 16, 2020 – a month after Amazon had taken our book down. The “author,” who claimed it as his work and posted “Copyright © 2020” on it, was shown as Marc Aboayda, who also has other sex-related and homosexuality-related eBooks for sale on Amazon.

Finally, how could all those eBook problems get past Amazon’s screening (which our book had to go through)? It couldn’t pass the eBook functionality tests. And of course, the content was clearly “offensive” by Amazon’s standards, since they had just banned our Health Hazards book on that account.

It’s all very weird.

Here's how it looks on an iPhone. The text of a normal eBook goes all the way down the page.

Dragging their feet in removing it

We immediately provided Amazon with the full information about the copyright infringement of The Negative Consequences of Same-Sex Sexual Behavior and demanded they take it down. We have seen books get taken down by Amazon – for legitimate reasons – within a matter of days. In this case, it took a week of fairly intense persuading.

We still haven’t been able to find out who “Marc Aboayda” really is. (We’re still working on that.) But worse, even though that one book has been removed, he still has his Amazon account intact and is selling several other of “his” books! But when Amazon removed our Health Hazards book, they closed our entire account.

Obviously, Amazon does not take plagiarism and copyright infringement very seriously (or they would at least close down that account). Certainly not as seriously as the “crime” of having conservative ideas.

When will our Health Hazards book be available again?

Unfortunately, at this point we don’t know. We are looking into finding a printer. We will keep you informed on this.

What you can do now

1. Tell Congress to hold Big Tech accountable. Recently Congress has been holding hearings on how Big Tech has a monopoly on information and discriminates against conservative material.
   Contact US Senator Mike Lee (R-UT). Sen. Lee is Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights.
   Select the topic: "Internet/Telecommunications." Tell him: "Amazon is using its monopoly power in the book industry to squelch free speech. It is banning important medical reference books and other books that disagree with Amazon's leftist agenda. This is high-tech book-burning. Anti-trust legislation is desperately needed!"
2. Join others and SIGN THIS PETITION to make a statement to Amazon! Don’t let Amazon silence the truth about these unhealthy and destructive behaviors.

Final thoughts

Any conservative or pro-family person publishing a book – especially as an independent author – that contradicts the liberal dogma needs to understand that the “woke” people who work at Amazon despise you. This is reflected from the top to the bottom. And unfortunately, for decades the right-wing press that publish mainstream “conservative” stars have avoided anything truly controversial.

We all need to find an alternative way to publish and distribute books with serious conservative content.

Since Amazon has a near-monopoly on book sales, this is a big problem for our country that needs to be addressed.