Scumbag Amazon

I first heard about the petition from Y Lolfa for Amazon to start allowing e-books to be sold yn Gymraeg via Syniadau. At first you may just think that this only affects people who have a kindle. But that's not true, you can download the kindle app onto your smart phone, tablet or computer allowing you to read e-books from the Amazon store. It's worth getting purely for the free classics that are available, and once you have an e-book it's available to you on any device you have the app on.

Amazon though, has decided that publishers like Y Lolfa are not allowed to publish books yn Gymraeg via their platform. And given the way that Kindle is dominating the e-book market it's a massive blow. So I created a few graphics in order to share via facebook and twitter.

Translation help by Hedd Gwynfor. Share via twitter | facebook

For those who don't speak Cymraeg and want to help support here is the same graphic in English.

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The basic premise of this is simple, it's a scumbag meme. The hat is the clue, regular readers will know I use this quite often. It's to highlight an unethical, hypocritical or morally wrong stance on something.

In this case Amazon has a distribution centre in Swansea the size of 10 football pitches. And yet it refuses to sell e-books yn Gymraeg. Wales is bilingual, between 2001 and 2011 the number of Welsh speakers in Wales fell by just just over twent thousand but the number of non-speakers increased by over 170,000. This enables anti-Wales organisations such as the BBC or the Western Fail to be able to manipulate the stats to show the language is decreasing without acknowledging the elephant in the room which is the vast number of non-speakers. 90% of those 170,000 were migrants into Wales.

Amazon supports other European minority languages such as Galician, Basque and Catalan. And yet refuses to allow the sale of books in one of the two languages where is has a massive distribution centre.

If you haven't done so already then please sign the petition http://www.deisebelyfrau.org/ My children are both being educated yn Gymraeg, I myself am a learner and my other half and her mother are kindle owning Welsh speakers. I want us all to be able to buy e-books yn Gymraeg. And once Amazon start selling e-books yn Gymraeg then surely other companies will follow suit. Feel free to share the pictures. Either use the links or right click, save as and share that way. I made it for Y Lolfa for it to be shared. How it gets shared isn't important.

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Distribute this via twitter | facebook (Cymraeg)