Outcry over book ‘censorship’ reveals how online retailers choose books — or don’t - The Washington Post

Consider that your local indie bookstore contains titles that have been carefully curated according to how much physical space is available, which books the managers consider worthy and what they anticipate customers will want to buy.

The World Wide Web is a different world. Large online book retailers are essentially search engines. They populate their sites by automatically sucking up inventory data from vast wholesalers, such as Ingram, so that they can, in effect, offer every book that exists. In the 1990s, that was part of Amazon's great innovation, which allowed it to be the World's Largest Bookstore, despite the fact that it began in Bezos's garage.