Ever since Dr. Faustus asked me about it on Twitter, I’ve been paying attention to the stories about a scummy British tabloid fright piece on dirty ebooks that has been rippling through the online bookselling ecosystem recently. It’s terribly difficult to get precise information, but it appears that all the major ebook retailers are going through their catalogs with fire and sword and badly-tuned keyword searches, removing many titles from availability and explaining themselves either badly or not-at-all.

The best summary (even if it’s a few days old now) that I’ve seen so far is here: Self-Published Erotica is Being Singled Out For Sweeping Deletions From Major eBookstores.

I haven’t done any independent reporting of my own, except to go check my own self-published ebook (a lightly-edited repackage and modernization of a neglected Victorian classic) in the Amazon and Kobo stores. I can report that it remains in both stores, though I did get a creepily-vague form email from Kobo putting me on notice of unspecified changes in how they enforce their unspecified policies.

I guess I don’t need to remind everybody that eventually the pornocalypse comes for us all…

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