Erotica stays, rape fantasies banned: A Kobo Writing Life Update
As you may be aware, in the face of some
fairly intense media scrutiny, we at Kobo launched a major review of the books
we offer for sale to make sure they comply with our content policy on offensive
material. We cast a wide net across our catalogue that included genres and
books coming from self-published authors, aggregators, and publishers, and we
quarantined many of these while we conducted the review that made them unavailable
in the UK during that time. The review had to happen fast, and we didn’t enjoy
it, but with our esteemed 300-year-old retail partner on the front page of
major newspapers and some content clearly in violation of our posted standards,
we needed to move quickly. Almost everyone on the Kobo Content Team, spread
across a dozen countries and time zones, was involved at one point or another.
The urgency was driven by our desire to make sure we were running a store that
met our own expectations and equally by the need to get our authors back up and
available for sale again in the UK as fast as possible.
The good news is that the vast majority
of self-published Kobo Writing Life titles are once again available on Kobo.com
in the UK, with most authors experiencing a gap of only a few days before their
books were once again in the catalogue. As well, we have been working closely
with our self-publishing aggregation partners. Most of their titles are once
again available in the UK or will be in the coming hours. If your book is still
unavailable and you think it shouldn’t be, please contact us.
For those few titles that remain
unavailable, some feel that we chose a path of censorship. All I can say is
that if your dream is to publish “barely legal” erotica or exploitative rape
fantasies, distribution is probably going to be a struggle for you. We aren’t
saying you can’t write them. But we don’t feel compelled to sell them. And yes,
many titles live in a grey zone with far more shades than the fifty that sold
so well in the past year, but that is what makes this all so challenging and so
interesting. Many of our readers have no problem with an erotic title in their
library next to their romance, literary fiction, investing or high-energy
physics books. And we are here for the readers, so erotica stays, a small but
interesting part of a multi-million-title catalogue, in all of its grey-shaded
glory. We will continue to work on reviewing processes and author
education about what we can take and what we can’t. It will never be perfect,
but our belief continues to be that if we focus on readers and growing our
business around them, we will get it right much more often than not.
Michael Tamblyn
Chief Content Officer
Kobo
I think this whole business is a storm in a teacup. Anyone, children included, can access photographic and filmed pornography online, whereas they would have to search quite specifically to find pornographic books. Also, what sort of parent abdicates their parental responsibility to a retail outlet?!!!!
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