The Self-Published Porn Flap

This probably didn't hit the national news. It might have barely made it to the major newspapers. But the author world seems to have risen up in indignation at decisions made by some publishers to stop carrying self-published books. Those publishers have done so in a knee-jerk reaction to complaints about porn.

I don't know for sure where or how it started, but apparently some self-publishers of print smut were disguising their work by giving innocuous titles, descriptions, and meta data. I suppose, if you were a reader of these things, you would recognized the veiled descriptions and know the book was for you, but if you didn't read these and were searching for something else you might accidentally buy a porn book. Such terms as "daddy" would alert the smut buyer it's about incest, but not alert other buyers it wasn't about an innocent family situation. Of course, that must also mean those innocent buyers didn't access or read the "look inside" sample.

Some publisher, maybe W.H. Smith in England, took all self-published books down from their web site while they sorted it out. WHS was not the publisher of these books, but they sold them on their book retailing site. I guess Kobo also did this in the USA. Self-publishers were understandably upset. Kobo's reaction was the most extreme, as they took every self-published book down until they could find the ones that violated their terms of service.

Since I don't check the websites of all book distributors to see if they have my books for sale, I never would have known about this without the uproar in the self-published authors blogosphere. For the record, I support the concept that these e-retailers can refuse to sell any book they want. They have no obligation to carry a book that is against their terms of service or business model.

But oh the uproar! How could they do this, delete books just because they had disguised smut that might end up on the e-readers of children? Some Facebook writer acquaintance linked to a petition about this, except the petition was aimed at Amazon, because apparently Amazon doesn't allow a whole lot of that in their e-store to begin with. I didn't copy the petition, unfortunately, and don't believe I could get back to the two-week old FB link. I started writing something about this at the time, looking at the petition and the comments from those who signed it. Here's what I wrote.

That "petition" is laughable. Amazon is just a retailer that makes decisions on what products to carry. They choose not to carry a certain kind of book. So what? Buy it somewhere else.

The comment son that thread are also ridiculous. "Who gives anyone the right to tell me what I can and cannot read?" and "I don't want anyone to tell me what I can or cannot read." Hello, people! That's not what Amazon is doing. Read whatever you want to. They just aren't selling what you want to read. And why, if you don't want anyone to tell you what you can read, do you think you can tell anyone what they have to sell?

Reading that now, I'm remembering that the petition accused Amazon of censorship. Never mind that Amazon isn't the government, it's a private company. Never mind that they aren't suppressing publishing, since so many venues exist where you can publish with no restrictions. Never mind that Amazon has had this policy in place for a long time, and that it was other retailers who had caused the recent flap. The Passive Guy calls this "Amazon Derangement Syndrome", and the people who created and signed this petition and commented on it sure had it.

How laughable that those who don't want to be told what to do (not that Amazon was doing that) are fine telling Amazon and other e-retailers what they must do. Unbelievable.