On Thursday, the Hollywood Reporter broke the news that the alt-right impresario Milo Yiannopoulos will publish a book with Threshold Editions, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Yiannopoulos, a thirty-three-year-old editor at Breitbart News, is known for stunts such as announcing the creation of a scholarship fund for white men, leading a racist online harassment campaign against the comedian Leslie Jones, and evangelizing against the “cancer” of “angry, bitter, profane, lesbianic” modern feminism. (That Yiannopoulos is gay only adds zest to that adjectival layer cake of misogyny.) Though he is often described as a troll provocateur, he prefers the label “free-speech fundamentalist.”

The books section of the Amazon site, with its Little League strategy of inventing niche genres to insure that the authors it wants to promote can all come in first place, has taken the bait. Though Yiannopoulos’s hardcover is not out until March, it is already ranked as the No. 1 best-seller in “Censorship & Politics,” which puts him in the strange company of actual free-speech heroes such as Barney Rosset, the visionary owner of Grove Press, and the Turkish journalist and editor Can Dündar, who was thrown in jail in 2015 after his newspaper reported that the Turkish government had sold arms to Syrian Islamist rebels. Rosset was arrested for publishing Henry Miller’s banned novel “Tropic of Cancer.” Dündar survived an assassination attempt, was convicted of treason, and escaped to Germany, where he now lives in exile. Yiannopoulos, too, has suffered an exile—from Twitter, which finally banned him in July, after the Jones affair. Evidently, the episode boosted Yiannopoulos’s sense of himself as a man not to be trifled with. The title of his book, printed over a headshot of Yiannopoulos apparently trying to both glare and roll his eyes, is “Dangerous.”

Getting kicked off Twitter hardly stopped Yiannopoulos in his tracks, but it did deny him a major platform for his provocations. That he would parlay his notoriety into some sort of book deal is an unsavory, if inevitable, prospect. The rude surprise is that a major company like Simon & Schuster would be the one to give it to him, along with a reported advance of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. By the standards of big publishing, that’s hardly a major sum of money for a celebrity’s, or even a pseudo-celebrity’s, book—Amy Schumer squeezed nine million out of Simon & Schuster for her memoir, “The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo”—but it’s still two hundred and fifty thousand dollars too many to give to a man who has helped define the Trump moment’s flippant bigotry in the service of brand-building narcissism. Even Yiannopoulos made a show of seeming surprised that his antics had paid off, and with such little effort on his part. “I met with top execs at Simon & Schuster earlier in the year and spent half an hour trying to shock them with lewd jokes and outrageous opinions,” he told the Hollywood Reporter. “I thought they were going to have me escorted from the building—but instead they offered me a wheelbarrow full of money.”

“Simon & Schuster” became a trending topic on Twitter on Thursday afternoon, as users excoriated the company for the deal. (Yiannopoulos-opposed users, that is. Members of his fan base entered the fray to jeer with the crying-from-laughter emoji.) Some, including the Washington Post writer Wesley Lowery, declared that they would boycott the company entirely. The Chicago Review of Books announced that it would not cover any titles published by Simon & Schuster in 2017.

As expressions of protest against Yiannopoulos and his opportunistic hate-mongering, I readily sympathize with these reactions. But the Yiannopoulos controversy is made harder to parse by a slippery characteristic of contemporary book publishing: the sheer size of publishing conglomerates, and the vast, often ideologically contradictory, array of books that they peddle. Threshold Editions, the imprint publishing “Dangerous,” was founded, in 2006, with a politically conservative mission. (It celebrated its decennial this year with the catch phrase “Ten Years of Being Right.”) You may be familiar with some of the influential authors it publishes: Rush Limbaugh, Mark R. Levin, Karl Rove, Michelle Malkin, Dick Cheney. Among the imprint’s best-sellers in 2015 were Trump’s “Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again,” and “It Is About Islam: Exposing the Truth About ISIS, Al Qaeda, Iran, and the Caliphate,” by Glenn Beck.

And yet, in 2016, Simon & Schuster announced that it was launching Salaam Reads, an imprint for Muslim-themed children’s books. That the Beck book, with its dire message about the danger that Islam poses to America, and Salaam Reads, with its presumably positive, inclusive one, could both flourish under the same publishing umbrella seems improbable, even hypocritical. But this kind of ideological mixed messaging has become standard at Simon & Schuster and other big publishing houses. At Threshold, Simon & Schuster puts out right-wing boilerplate like Lou Dobbs’s “Upheaval” or Laura Ingraham’s 2010 best-seller “The Obama Diaries” (sample passage: “I was going to write about tonight’s state dinner for Mexico and the amnesty plan, but we’ve got a national crisis here! I think somebody’s been snooping in this diary!”). Meanwhile, under its eponymous imprint, Simon & Schuster publishes works of mainstream history and political science—“Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century” by Daniel Oppenheimer or “Dark Territory,” Fred Kaplan’s history of cyber warfare, to name a couple of recent titles—as well as others explicitly at odds with Threshold’s ideological goals. “American Amnesia,” by the political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, seems like it could be a Mark R. Levin book until you get to the subtitle: “How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper.”

One way to look at this contradiction is to see the Simon & Schuster publishing apparatus as a structural seesaw, with books of competing approaches and points of view balancing each other out. It can be tempting to go a step further and imagine that some sort of Robin Hooding is at work—that Simon & Schuster spreads around profits from its different imprints, using the income from Threshold best-sellers to fund worthy books that otherwise might be too financially risky to publish. But it’s not clear that that’s necessarily the case. Simon & Schuster has many other best-sellers, after all, and the company isn’t exactly transparent about how it allocates its profits and resources. Even if such Robin Hooding were occurring, it wouldn’t solve the Yiannopoulos problem, which is the existence of such truly noxious books in the first place.

And that brings us to the trouble with a blanket boycott: it risks hurting the readers who want to get to the good stuff, rather than the company that publishes all of it, the nectar along with the dreck. A blanket boycott of Simon & Schuster would mean missing out on “The Blood of Emmett Till,” by Timothy B. Tyson, a new history of Till’s lynching and the birth of the civil-rights movement, and on “Democracy Now!: Twenty Years of Covering the Movements Changing America” by Amy Goodman, which came out in April and will be available in paperback soon. Skipping those books and so many others seems like a raw deal for readers. And it seems like a raw deal for writers, too, when you stop to think about how the numbers will be tallied up at the end of the day. What will happen if Milo Yiannopoulos gets people to buy his book, and writers like Timothy B. Tyson, or Elaine Showalter, or Rebecca Traister don’t? Threshold isn’t the only problem; mainstream imprints at big publishers already skew male and very, very white. As the novelist Marlon James recently outlined in an essay on diversity panels, the publishing industry has poured energy into having the euphemistic “conversation” about improving diversity even as publishing companies themselves avoid investing in a wider variety of writers. (This is another reason why the notion of the Yiannopoulos deal is such an insult.) For that to happen, it will take active financial pressure from book buyers to incentivize companies to publish the titles we want to read.