It’s happening again.
Yet again, fanfiction.net is
having a purge of offensive fics. As before, without warning to the authors.
And in the wider world, self-published
e-books are getting slapped.
This is a quote from the digital reader.
Many authors have reported that their titles
had been pulled from the Kindle Store with little explanation beyond the
statement that the titles in question violated Amazon’s policies on
“Description, Cover Image”. Many don’t have a clue what that is supposed to
mean, including the author who forwarded one of the emails to me.
All of the titles are erotica. All
of these books are legal.
Like these purges, it is pandering
to the opinion of a few. And do I have to point out that just because something
is self-published does not make it worse (or better) than a print book? This is
censorship… AGAIN. Are they deleting offending print books? No. There is incest
in Game of Thrones - has that been deleted? Flowers in the attic? Lolita? Nope.
I don’t want to read dinosaur
porn. It doesn’t even make sense to me, but if you want to read that? Fine.
The real problem is that someone
else’s ideas may be further away from mine. I like to read gay sex, heck I have
even written some. So if someone finds my liking for gay sex offensive, can
they delete all the books that I want to read? No - that’s censorship.
The news reports of this use words
like, ‘barely legal’, ‘offensive’, ‘filth’, ‘vile trade’ or ‘sick’.
Emotive words.
Words that assume that you believe
the same thing they do.
And I don’t.
I think a world where the few can
tell the many what to read and what not to read is the start of something much
worse.
