The Recent Ebooks Pornocalypse
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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Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=10761
Keep in mind Kobo is pulling books on a country by country basis. If your IP is not in a country where your book is blocked, it looks hunky-dory.
Yes. When I was drafting this post mentally I thought I’d write “the Amazon and Kobo stores displayed in my jurisdiction” but, somehow, I forgot to put it in.
All of my books, published via Smashwords (but free to download) on both my real name and pseudonym were pulled by Kobo. Some offer sex, but none that deals with the “problem” categories offered, and three are not sexual in any way.
So I went onto Smashwords and told them to remove them from Kobo. If we all did that, Kobo would be a lot poorer. It’s a small platform and needs market share and treating self-published authors with contempt and disgust is not appropriate. So with great pleasure I told them to do one. :)
Bugger.
I wonder if my growing collection of dirty Kindle books will be safe, considering Amazon’s increasing foray into adult items?
Hopefully, this will inspire some company to set up a publishing site catering specifically to the needs of the adult ebook market, most especially erotic romance writers, who are arguably producing most of the sales in the fiction marketplace. Because that’s EXACTLY what “Fifty Shades of Grey” was, people. It’s almost as if, embarrassed that Fifty Shades of Grey came straight from that dirty, smelly self-publishing world, that booksellers are ensuring that nothing horrible like 70 million sales of an erotic romance, especially, a kinky one, will happen again. Talking about cutting off your nose to spite your face!