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ITEM: Amazon.com has been deleting incest-themed erotica books both from its online store and from the Kindles of users that bought said books.
Which is why I still don’t want a Kindle.
Let’s get the obvious bit out of the way (and this may be the part where some of you may de-friend me):
I don’t particularly have a problem with incest erotica as a fiction genre (as opposed to incest in real life), regardless of whether the participants are consenting adults or not. I don’t especially want to read it, either. But I’m not offended by its existence for a simple reason: it’s fiction, and no one is victimized in its creation, just as no one is actually eaten by zombies in the creation of a zombie novel.
(Also, those of you who have ever had that sex fantasy about a threesome with twins are in no position to throw stones.)
Amazon has the right to make judgment calls on what it sells, but I’m not convinced it has the right to sell you something, then decide it’s offensive, connect to the device it sold you and delete the book/story you paid for. I’m keen on e-book readers as a concept, but I refuse to buy an e-book device where booksellers get to monitor what I read and delete what they think I shouldn’t be reading (particularly when they’re the ones who sold me the damn book in the first place).
To be fair, Amazon has said the deletion of books from Kindles was temporary due to a “technical glitch”, and that the books in question are still available to people who already downloaded copies. I don’t think it matters. I just don’t want to participate in an ecosystem where a bookseller has the right to take my books away from me, whether I’m entitled to a refund or not.
And for all its talk about being anti-censorship, Amazon’s track record on this suggests that its free speech principles only go so far, and are subject to change if enough public pressure is applied. Incest is an easy book category to ban on moral grounds, but you’d have to include books by Faulkner, Heinlein and Nabokov (to name a few) if you want people to take yr "moral" content policy seriously.
More to the point, imagine if Amazon had released the Kindle in, say, 2001, and what kinds of books it might be recalling in a post-9/11 climate, particularly if certain senators started sending them letters.
So I’ll pass, thanks – at least until Amazon changes its e-book policy.
FULL DISCLOSURE: No, I won’t be boycotting Amazon altogether. I do still need them for ordering real books and CDs from time to time, for reasons I’ve explained elsewhere.
Deleted,
This is dF
Which is why I still don’t want a Kindle.
Let’s get the obvious bit out of the way (and this may be the part where some of you may de-friend me):
I don’t particularly have a problem with incest erotica as a fiction genre (as opposed to incest in real life), regardless of whether the participants are consenting adults or not. I don’t especially want to read it, either. But I’m not offended by its existence for a simple reason: it’s fiction, and no one is victimized in its creation, just as no one is actually eaten by zombies in the creation of a zombie novel.
(Also, those of you who have ever had that sex fantasy about a threesome with twins are in no position to throw stones.)
Amazon has the right to make judgment calls on what it sells, but I’m not convinced it has the right to sell you something, then decide it’s offensive, connect to the device it sold you and delete the book/story you paid for. I’m keen on e-book readers as a concept, but I refuse to buy an e-book device where booksellers get to monitor what I read and delete what they think I shouldn’t be reading (particularly when they’re the ones who sold me the damn book in the first place).
To be fair, Amazon has said the deletion of books from Kindles was temporary due to a “technical glitch”, and that the books in question are still available to people who already downloaded copies. I don’t think it matters. I just don’t want to participate in an ecosystem where a bookseller has the right to take my books away from me, whether I’m entitled to a refund or not.
And for all its talk about being anti-censorship, Amazon’s track record on this suggests that its free speech principles only go so far, and are subject to change if enough public pressure is applied. Incest is an easy book category to ban on moral grounds, but you’d have to include books by Faulkner, Heinlein and Nabokov (to name a few) if you want people to take yr "moral" content policy seriously.
More to the point, imagine if Amazon had released the Kindle in, say, 2001, and what kinds of books it might be recalling in a post-9/11 climate, particularly if certain senators started sending them letters.
So I’ll pass, thanks – at least until Amazon changes its e-book policy.
FULL DISCLOSURE: No, I won’t be boycotting Amazon altogether. I do still need them for ordering real books and CDs from time to time, for reasons I’ve explained elsewhere.
Deleted,
This is dF
