Monday 14 October 2013

Censorship of e-books

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.


No comments:

Post a Comment