The online bookstores themselves say that they regularly do searches in their assortment to be able to pick out books with hateful messages. But at the same time, they mean that the automated influx of new titles is too big to be able to review each book before they start selling.
Svante Weyler, publisher and chairman of the Swedish Committee on Anti-Semitism, thinks booksellers should have a better look at their books.
- It really scares me that a bookseller does not have complete control over the books they sell. This means that people who want to spread their propaganda can use the system, he tells Kulturnytt.
"Titles on our site that we do not want to sell"Cultural news went through a list of British anti-racist Hope not Hate, where the organization listed anti-Semitic literature. They then found seven different books that appear on Swedish bookstores' websites. Five at Adlibris and three at Bokus and Akademibokhandeln.
Harold Op het Veld is the range manager at Bokus and Akademibokhandeln.
- Our goal is to have a proactive solution in place so that we do not include these titles in our range. Unfortunately, it happens that titles come in on our site for sale that we do not want to sell, he says.
Adlibris responds to the criticism in an e-mail to Kulturnytt.
- We do regular searches in the assortment, but we get an average of 75,000 new titles every month, so it happens that a title that we will not sell will appear on the site before we can discover and remove it.