Slashdot Mirror
Amazon Taking Down Erotica, Removing From Kindles
ctmurray writes "The independent writers who publish on Amazon report that erotica books containing incest are being taken down with no explanation by Amazon, and removed from the Kindles of purchasers of the books. Author Selena Kitt writes: 'I want to be clear that while the subject of incest may not appeal to some, there is no underage contact in any of my work, and I make that either explicitly clear in all my stories or I state it up front in the book's disclaimer. I don't condone or support actual incest, just as someone who writes mysteries about serial killers wouldn't condone killing. What I write is fiction.' Kindle's own TV ad features a book with a story line of sex between a 19-year-old and his stepmother, defined in some states as incest (Sleepwalking by Amy Bloom)."
Didn't Amazon say that they would no longer remove books remotely?
I hope they also remove Romeo and Juliet, since they had sex while Juliet was 14, a clear case of kiddie porn.
Except it is so sad, there's nothing to laugh about.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Doesn't this prove you're actually just subsidizing their content delivery system?
You don't actually own it, or anything on it.
Not until this kind of crap stops being possible. I don't just mean "Amazon stops pulling Kindle books that people have already purchased and promises not to do it again," I mean when they can't -- i.e. when e-books can actually be purchased, in a non-DRM, non-phone-home format that the people who buy them actually own.
Yes, I know there are people selling plain PDFs, and good for them. But Amazon is such a dominant force in the market that they're going to have to take the lead, or be replaced at the top spot. I'm not optimistic -- this is going to drag on for years, maybe decades, and the potential of the e-book market will go largely unfulfilled in the meantime.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Bestiality, SM, dozens of paraphilias, sex with amazon women... all sorts of promising possibilities.
Mod Me Up. You'll make a grown man cry.
I was literally just looking at buying a Kindle for myself for Xmas...and then read this...
I really really don't like the idea of Amazon being able to reach in to my library and burn my books.
So what's the open alternative?
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
I wonder if they will also be removing Heinlein books. I think it was _Time Enough for Love_ that had some incest.
As fellow author, Will Belegon, noted, if Amazon is going to start pulling books with incest in them: "I just re-read Genesis 19: 30-38 and realized that Lot's daughters got him drunk, had sex with him and bore sons. I demand you follow your clear precedent and remove The Bible from Kindle."
So they'll be removing Nabokov's Lolita and Ada any time now...
this is why DRM is bad. Other parties control what you can or can't do with your property. Even if this was child porn - Amazon shouldn't be able to remove a damn thing from anyone's kindle.
This is why I'll never buy anything with Digital Restriction Management in it... Give me something that I control, then we'll talk...
Meeting the freedom of a corporation to do whatever it wants, because clearly, clearly, there's no reason to protect ourselves from them at all.
It's just Un-American otherwise.
Yeah, right.
We need a new Constitution, and a new Bill of Rights, in order to add in some words and situations to cover modern times, because you know what I've found? That people just stop thinking when they feel something isn't in a document written a few hundred years ago by a bunch of long-dead guys who might have been smart for their time, but were sensible enough to learn from the past when they were making a foundation for their new future. Which they made by casting off their existing shackles. Oh sure, they didn't completely do things the right way, otherwise they'd have outright banned slavery from the start, or at least phased it out, or something. But they did take a number of positive steps.
Now it's our turn.
Or we can just sit on our asses, watch TV and wait for the next big thing to come along.
why I use open file formats (clear-text ascii, epub, pdf files) for my ebooks, non-networked ebook readers even if they are more expensive than their Amazon- or B&N-sponsored brethren, and ebook management software that I'm fairly sure doesn't call home to "manage" my digital rights.
But, you might say, what if you want books that aren't in the public domain? You're right, it's almost impossible to legally find DRM-free recent ebooks from mainstream authors. As a result, I either scan/OCR someone's dead-tree version for myself, or download the DRM-free version, then I send the money directly to the author (usually the price listed at Amazon). That way:
(1) I have files that I'm sure I'll always be able to read, and aren't tied to some vendor's idea of what I can or can't do with them, and what device I need to use to read them,
(2) my favorite authors get the full amount of my payment and the greedy publishers none, and
(3) the author's heirs get none of my money because I don't pay when the author is dead, which is how I think things should go in the copyright world.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
A spokesperson from Amazon will surely allay our fears - they aren't taking any of the books about murder, massacres, or war! You'll still be able to get your fill reading about people being beheaded, stabbed, maimed, .. even burned to death!
Honestly, what's all the fuss?
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
My kindle has nothing but pirated books off of torrent sites. Can amazon remotely remove books that I have not bought through their system?
I sure hope they removed The Holy Bible, too. Lot has sex with both of his daughters, it's right there in Genesis. And Lot's even the hero of the story, the one righteous man allowed to escape Sodom. It would be a real shame if they applied a double standard.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
I just posted this in the "Anonymous cannot take down mega-corp Amazon" story, but it also fits extremely well here. Just add this, the TV/Radio/Newspapers became mega-corps. Now book-publishing might do the same along with the internet. And the mega-corp then decides what does and what does not get published. First they came for the incest writers. Who is next? There used to be small publishers like Olympia Press, funded by daring indivuduals operating on shoe string budgets that dared to publish what nobody else dared to. How can Olympia Press compete with Amazon? Hint: Olympia Press books are (or more likely were as they are often pornograhphic including incest themes) sold on Amazon, the company itself is gone.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1910334&cid=34557794
What we are seeing here has been seen before. If you ever wondered just why TV, radio and the newspapers all seem to be controlled by a handfull of men, then you must realize that this was not always the case. The first newspapers were created by concerned citizens, reasonably well off concernced citizens who could afford to setup a new business but hardly the super rich.
First radio? Amateurs, geeks and nerds of their day who took their hobby of messing about with this new stuff to a new level. Ham radio to the max. Television? Same thing, done from peoples living room. Some dutch broadcasting license holders still got it in their name AVRO (Algemene Vereniging Radio Omroep) Veronica started as a pirate station to bring the new music of the age to the airwaves that the by then established AVRO and others didn't play. Or not enough.
But Veronica, the pirate, went commerical and were bought out. Nothing of its original nature remains, it is now a mere name in SBS Broadcasting. A soulless mega-corp were absolutely nothing counts but ad-revenue.
Yet how did this happen? How did we go from amateur and politically motivated Radio, TV and newspapers to the current mass-produced elite controlled bland media?
It is simple. Scale. Veronica tried to go commercial on its own (the dutch broadcasting system is inexplainable but briefly, Veronica became part of the public network by a system where air time is allocated according to the number of subscribers a broadcaster has, there also exist commercial stations that opperate without a license fee support (used to be collected same as for the BBC, now it is part of normal taxes)) and failed. To small to survive this mistake it was bought and split up. A troublesome station, silenced. Veronica ONCE had a rather good news program with one of the few tv-presentors that actually followed up with though questions. Now it is the beavus and butthead station. It ALWAYS was young but with hints of rebellion and some principles, now it is just an MTV light. The young and mindless.
As time moved on, radio stations, newspapers and tv broadcasters were bought up, consolidated with any small operator being unable to afford any stumble without it being preyed upon by richer soulless companies. Meanwhile the costs of starting a new newspaper, a new radio staton a new tv station became higher and higher. Who after all is going to run an add on a local station with no known talent or must-watch-tv when for the same money he can air his add nationwide?
It has lead to the situation that right now a lot of media is controlled by just a few people who have very disturbing connections. Do you really expect Ruper Murdoch to dive into a banking scandal when he is close mated with the bankers? Of course not.
BUT the internet is free... yeah, it used to be... but now, even a widely distrubuted site like Wikileaks can be severely hampered, raising the cost to Wikileaks to remain online. And how are they going to pay for it? Maybe use a small banker with high principles... oh but all the banks consolidated. Maybe use a small ISP with high principles.... oh but all the ISP's consolidated... maybe use a DNS provide
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
First taking down hosting for Wikileaks despite not being charged with anything just because they feel like it'd be fun, and then this, also just because they feel like doing it. Like Wikileaks, the books are again not illegal, and I suspect many readers thought we were over book burning. This is even worse - taking the books out of the hand of their readers having purchased them, and *then* burning them. It's getting pretty hard here to not fall into that Godwin hole.
Was Amazon seeing a lot of bad press over openly offering books to read, or what?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Do those who have their purchased books removed at least get their money back? Otherwise it's plain theft. The real kind of theft, not copyright infringement. No license "agreements" can change that.
I have a Kindle but I wouldn't dream of putting myself in this position. I only buy DRM free (often watermarked though) books that I can convert to mobi format and read on the Kindle, and there are tons of free books out there as well. Oh, my next ebook reader will NOT be a Kindle, that's for sure.
I used to be an Amazon fan but I've started to hate them more and more. Bookstores shouldn't censor content based on some stupid conservative "morals", only follow what is absolutely required by law.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Does this also include the fantasy series by George R.R. Martin ? Hell what about Shakespeare and other Literature works ? If amazon wants to ban books this way shouldn't they also take this books out of their traditional webshop sortiment as well ? I don't understand why they would do this on the electronic side then sell the traditional book on other , makes no sense.
That was a press release from Amazone, this is Amazon.
How long will the battery last on these "book" things? Can I read them in the sun? What if they get wet, are they water proofed? Can I make notes on them? Can they display color? What is the resolution?
Ah, see! Your "book" tech just can't compete! Bring me something that runs for centuries without a recharge, has a DPI over 300, can do infinite colors, is shock resistant, can be cheaply produced, easily resold 2nd hand and I can use to swat a fly with.
We need the best and brightest for this! Maybe some tech from China improved by German engineering! We could test it on say the Bible, first runs might be worth a bit of money perhaps.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This is incredible. Now they don't even need to buy matches. Just a few keystrokes, and it is like the book never existed. Doesn't even leave ashes...
Quite sad.
"It seems that we are at the age where life stops giving us things, and starts taking them away..." Indiana Jones
That's what we get by letting big corps slowly substitute (admittedly imperfect) states. In the end, there won't be any difference between Western states and e.g. China. A regimen of greed of the rich.
I have about 4600 science-fiction books in my ereader (the worst and cheapest of the market), so the true comparation is eBook Reader vs Library.
Can you have 4500 books on your pockets? Wen I finish reading one book, I can choose any other, I don't have to wait.
-Woof woof woof!
When did it all start going wrong? How did we willingly turn over control of our culture to greedy corporates? We condemn regimes with censorship, but are blind to what we have become ourselves.
amazon is a private company and has the right to refuse business to anyone it wants. of course, it may be controlling 60-80-whatever % of online sales, but, it is well within their right to do so.
in the meantime, the citizens of united states, who do not want censorship, can wait for another company to come and challenge them and grab enough market share from them to be accessible and well priced with the same selection. it may take 5-10 years, but hey ! at least, you are free ! even if you may not have the means to practice your freedom until the 'free market' adjusts itself with the act of 'invisible hand' in 10 years !!
Read radical news here
I have a new Nook here, which is a complete piece of junk. It can't handle PDFs in reasonable way, no zoom at all. And yet today I remember why I waited so long to get a Nook instead of a Kindle.
I'm returning the Nook, and now won't be getting the Kindle. I should all but applaud Amazon's desire to remind us of their complete disassociation with the Constitution.
I'd write cust service, but who are we kidding. Only surgical removal of dollars is real to them. But if we could, I'd write "Dear Jeff -- you don't tell my kids what they can read at my expense."
How long before we admit eReaders are nothing but PAID FOR ads for certain distributors?
+5.
Read radical news here
Why anyone wants to buy a device that someone else will control is beyond me. What if you're car wouldn't let you drive to a store that sells porn? Why do we want to put the control of our choice of art in the hands of a faceless corporation?
Hell, if incest is bad... what about murder?
I think they should take down all books with murder, violence, incest, fraud, drug offenses, adultery, etc.
In fact, why sell fiction books? It's all blasphemy anyway. We should devote our lives to studying the state-propaganda. If that's good enough for the state, it is good enough for us.
I don't like Amazon's decision, but it's their right. They are NOT the government.
I shop at Whole Foods Market. They refuse to sell any products that contain high fructose corn syrup; their business model involves looking, acting, and (hopefully) being healthier than the other grocery chains. Can I reasonably complain that they are attacking my freedom of choice by not selling products that contain HFCS? I have to go to a second store to get Twinkies, but I knew when I went to WF that I would not be able to find Twinkies there.
If you want incest-related fiction, you will have to shop somewhere that sells it. Amazon chooses not to.
"Don't blame the log for the fire." --Andrew Ratshin
I really hope they're planning on removing all copies of The Graduate...
I just had this argument not long ago with someone about the adoption of E-readers, and how this could be considered a disadvantage. Well of course he brought up the whole, "But Amazon said they wouldn't do it anymore...". Looks like someone is going to be eating crow tonight and yes I belive stunts like this be it Amazon or any of the other big players will hurt E-readers in the long run, not just DRM. Apparently the whole, "just because we can" is enough.
That's when Amazon takes it upon themselves to update books on your Kindle, without your knowledge.
They'll probably sell it as a feature, first. Science text books for college, for example. Every year, we'll upgrade your copy to the latest version, etc...
But one day, it will be "Those historical facts no longer represent the current thinking of the administration. So remove those historical facts from this text book, and replace them with these approved-facts."
How else am I supposed to get the latest issues of Family Talk while living overseas? Come on Amazon!
Monstar L
this
I don't like Amazon's decision, but it's their right. They are NOT the government
becomes more and more bogus the more Big Corp replaces the (admittedly very imperfect) democracies we have.
Why would I ever want to buy a Kindle?
Oliver.
After the 1984 incident, Amazon was sued by a customer and settled for $150,000. They also agreed not to remove books from customer's devices - not just in a wishy-washy statement but in their court settlement:
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/amazon20091001.pdf
If Amazon did this again, then they may be in for another lawsuit. I can believe that they removed the books from their service. But it doesn't make sense for them to pull the books from devices. Until we see more evidence than a couple of random unnamed sources in a blog post, I don't buy it.
im going. ill be back when i learned how to read. and write.
Read radical news here
Can't the Kindle support other non DRMed formats as well? This isn't an issue with the device, it's an issue with the store.
I dream of a nation where a man is not judged by his skin color but by an number assigned by a credit rating agency.
You bought your kindle but you don't really own it and can't do ANYTHING you necessarily want with it.
I don't care what material it is, illegally downloaded child pornography copyrighted by Viacom and downloaded on bittorrent, Amazon should not have the right to remotely remove content from my devices. I'm not allowed to break into their house and burn the books I sold them when I change my mind about the sale after the fact, neither should they be allowed to do the electronic equivalent. When did we stop being citizens and owners and become mere consumers and licensees?
A step to "Fahrenheit 451". I already deleted my Amazon account.
As a retailer your job is to sell stuff, not to impose whatever your morality on others. And most definitely, not post-sale. Definitely won't be buying a kindle seeing how things are.
It's just another set of books that'll be sold during Banned Books Week. Then re-released on the kindle for maximum viewing pleasure (intended).
again? shock and awe!
Im not sure if its possible(DRM and all that jazz) but maybe its time to educate the masses about creating their own storage space for digital files. I've been pushing my friends and family away from storing pictures and other digital content online. They are slowly beginning to understand the concept of "here today gone tomorrow." I've heard of it happening with music, games(Steam) and i guess ebooks arent out of the crosshairs either.
In other news, Amazon was shocked and terrified to learn that teenagers were found to regularly and eagerly engage in copulation out-of-wedlock. Jeff Bezos was quoted as saying "I had no idea hormonally-charged humans were interested in coitus. I, for one, have been virgin since I was twelve, though not necessary by my own choice."
Traci Lords was unavailable for comment, but Magic Johnson is reported to have cracked a devilish grin at Bezos. And now for your local news about some retarded kid stuck in a well.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
AMZN closed yesterday at $173.94
In less than three months it will trade below $150.
Stockholders in AMZN will be punished for this transgression.
The market will not make a new high above $180 this year.
Bagholders|^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HInvestors will get what they deserve for financing such a corrupt firm.
~Anonymous.
This may be ignored now, however it will be linked to again when the prediction comes to pass. People will learn, eventually.
So, buying Kindle means that anything on your device might disappear at whim of Amazon? They should add that as a disclaimer to their product. Would solve the future of their product atleast. Tablets might kill ebooks anyway though.
While I agree that Amazon does have the right not sell certain eBooks, they have also removed it from people's devices with no refund. Yes I RTFA.
This would be the equivalent of you bought Twinkies at Whole Foods Market and then they decided they were no longer going to sell them, so they sent people around to all the houses that bought the Twinkies and took them back with out repayment.
Fortunately in Canada this is illegal.
Unfortunately our judges don't always uphold our laws. Just look at how Sony somehow won illegally taking the Other OS option away form us. They advertised the PS3 as a computer and you can run another OS, but their false advertising is for some reason acceptable because they are a big company.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
Guys, It seems top me the front is NOT accurate : the books weren't deleted from the Kindles, but from the Archive. So people who had it loaded on the Kindle still get access to them. For the ones who removed them from their Kindle though, too bad... It's NOT that much better though since Amazon, B&N, Google et all seem to want to be the ones to control your "Archive" forever by having you access your books only through their servers... I wonder if they propose a way to download the total archive at some point ...
That was then. This now. Not only do Amazon remove books, they now remove people. I for one do not welcome our Corporate overlords.
Personally, I would never buy this device that deigns to control my library. It's on there, you don't touch it. I don't care if the company thinks it's malware, copyright infringed, or for the children - delivery of books should be ONE WAY. Amazon should no more take digital books away than breaking into houses and stealing physical copies.
But if this were a copyright discussion there would be no end of people arguing how this is the digital realm and you can't treat it like physical property. So why do you think you "own" the unownable? Exchange of money? No more so than the content creators investment of time and effort means they "own " their works. Moral right? I thought we did away with those? Terribly inconvenient those were.
This kind of move is not only against the freedom of press and speech. It's also against the society by increasing sexual abuse, especially of children. See article Porn: Good for us? and its references (emphasis added).
To examine the effect this widespread use of porn may be having on society, researchers have often exposed people to porn and measured some variable such as changes in attitude or predicted hypothetical behaviors, interviewed sex offenders about their experience with pornography, and interviewed victims of sex abuse to evaluate if pornography was involved in the assault. Surprisingly few studies have linked the availability of porn in any society with antisocial behaviors or sex crimes. Among those studies none have found a causal relationship and very few have even found one positive correlation.
Despite the widespread and increasing availability of sexually explicit materials, according to national FBI Department of Justice statistics, the incidence of rape declined markedly from 1975 to 1995. This was particularly seen in the age categories 20–24 and 25–34, the people most likely to use the Internet. The best known of these national studies are those of Berl Kutchinsky, who studied Denmark, Sweden, West Germany, and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. He showed that for the years from approximately 1964 to 1984, as the amount of pornography increasingly became available, the rate of rapes in these countries either decreased or remained relatively level. Later research has shown parallel findings in every other country examined, including Japan, Croatia, China, Poland, Finland, and the Czech Republic. In the United States there has been a consistent decline in rape over the last 2 decades, and in those countries that allowed for the possession of child pornography, child sex abuse has declined . Significantly, no community in the United States has ever voted to ban adult access to sexually explicit material. The only feature of a community standard that holds is an intolerance for materials in which minors are involved as participants or consumers.
In terms of the use of pornography by sex offenders, the police sometimes suggest that a high percentage of sex offenders are found to have used pornography. This is meaningless, since most men have at some time used pornography. Looking closer, Michael Goldstein and Harold Kant found that rapists were more likely than nonrapists in the prison population to have been punished for looking at pornography while a youngster, while other research has shown that incarcerated nonrapists had seen more pornography, and seen it at an earlier age, than rapists. What does correlate highly with sex offense is a strict, repressive religious upbringing.
Repressive, religious upbringing is exactly what porn bans are.
It's already being done. There is no such thing as an "edition" with e-books. They are modified at the whim of the publisher.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
I'm surprised no one mentioned this earlier. I remember reading the story about a year ago and thinking "We must still be pretty far away from that..."
Damn.
Amazon: breach of trust and unreliable service.
Fuck them.
At some level, we all already know this. Every time you hear or say "fuck you" it's bad right? Show a boob in public or on TV? It's bad! Sometimes even the act of eating a strawberry dipped in whipped cream can be bad. Anything even vaguely acknowledging sex is just bad. Why can't we get the point clear.
On the other hand, killing is perfectly acceptable. So from here on out, when you are angry, please try not to say "fuck you" and instead say "kill you." It's far more acceptable in every social circle and circumstance.
Genesis 19:23-25, 30-36 , NLT
Didn't Amazon say that they would no longer remove books remotely?
Yes. And from the research I did into this story yesterday, they haven't in this case. What they have done is removed the files from their servers, so you can no longer redownload them for a new device (and as this service is included in the price of an amazon e-book, you are therefore entitled to a refund if you bought any of the books that have been removed).
Yes; moreover, TFA seems to say as much, although it could be clearer.
When some of my readers began checking their Kindle archives for books of mine they’d purchased on Amazon, they found them missing from their archives. [emphasis added]
Can someone clarify what "Kindle archives" means in this context? Because I can't find one word in the article that says the book was deleted from any customer's local storage.
I don't mean to defend the decision to censor by any means, and this is still downright dishonest if the customers had a reasonable expectation that Amazon would go on providing their books for re-download perpetually. (I'm sure the fine print absolves Amazon of any legal responsibilities to keep hosting the books; as for refunds, I don't know.) But it's miles and miles away from deleting books from local storage on customer-owned devices. Unless there are further facts about remote deletions that the linked article omits, the summary is wrong and potentially libelous. Furthermore, if I'm right, Amazon is in fact abiding by (the letter of) the promises they made after the 1984 debacle.
"This algorithm runs in constant time. Come on, 2,147,483,648 is a constant..."
So, "and removed from the Kindles of purchasers of the books" isn't true. The books were pulled from user's online archives however. That's still a bad move, but not the same situation as 1984. If Amazon decides to stop carrying incest stories, graphic or implied, that's up to them. But, naturally, they're going about it all wrong, again.
Lets be honest, everyone here is on some sort of social media system these days, and as such, we can make statements that are seen by a number of people. If enough of use post a headline "Don't by a Kindle, here's why," editorialize and post the link. I think it may spread the message better than slashdot will. You just know that the standard media outlets won't publish crap about it.
Way to lose the ebook reader war amazon, dont you peoples learn from history, lack of porn killed beta max... Only this time lack of porn is going to kill the inferior product and give the nook color its time in the sun!
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=ezekiel+23%3A20
Well I certainly hope they have also removed that disgusting "novel" Lady Chatterley's Lover :-)
I guess the Bible would have to be banned from Amazon & Kindle too as it mentions incest several times
Well thank goodness that I can still buy the DVDs of "Clerks" which features a woman having sex with a dead man, and "Clerks II" which actually shows a man having sex with a donkey. God bless Kevin Smith.
Good, now I know I will NEVER buy a book, Kindle or any other product from them...and I suppose I'm not the only one.
If you post as an AC, don't expect me to spend a mod point on you.
I don't care what Amazon choose to sell or not to sell. That is their decision.
But once they do sell a book to a customer, that book belongs to that customer forever and ever without end. Amazon cannot take back that book once they sell it. They might regret selling the book. They might hate that they sold it, but the deal is done and over.
They need to immediately restore the book to everyone they stold it from and pay a few million in damages to keep them from ever stealing books again.
You can't have history books covering say Europe during Renaissance without some extensive Royal incest...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
I would say anyone who still purchases a Kindle after all the bullshit Amazon's pulled deserves everything they get, but I can't. Not until we require Sony, Amazon, et. al. to disclose their actions in these matters right on the box and in every advertisement. Think of it as an extension of "truth in advertising."
Hell, George RR Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" series has plenty of incest, to the point one might call it a theme and The Silmarillion also features the incest of Turin and Nienor (I think Asimov and Le Guin also wrote stories containing incest). But why stop there? Gotta ban Oedipus, any stories about the Ptolemies (probably where Martin got the idea for the Targaryen sibling marriages), Nabakov's Ada or Ardor and Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude, not to mention the the bible, just to name a few off the top of my head.
Censorship of art is by its nature arbitrary, capricious and dumb. But that doesn't mean people won't try to continue to perpetrate it, most often today under feeble rationale that it isn't the government censoring, but a corporation (whose existence relies on a special government charter) and this somehow makes it all okay. Guess what, it doesn't. I mean the fact that WBAI wouldn't broadcast a reading of Ginsberg's Howl on the 50th anniversary of the censorship trial that declared it a non-obscene work... it's not ironic, it's just fucked up, and it shows we're in the middle of a dangerous backslide on free speech.
In books you have to start deleting back to Oedipus the King and kill most of the literature in all the path. And if that trend goes to movies, well, you will have to go back to the future. And there you could see the dangers of rewriting history.
Actually it seems to me even more WTF than that.
It's not incest in the biological sense that happens there, at least judging by the summary. That guy isn't boning his actual mom or anything. It's sex between two adults that are as unrelated as it gets, except for the fact that one of them had married a parent of the other.
Even the usual objections about making kids with six toes don't actually apply. Those people aren't actually biologically related.
It's no more incest than, dunno, boning your cousin's wife.
Granted, boning a friend's or relative's wife is generally accepted as a not nice thing to do. That guy isn't very filial, to say the least. But incest? It's incest only via a legal redefinition in _some_ states. And not the kind of "incest" most people think of when they hear that word. For most of us it's _less_ incest than marrying one's second cousin, which is actually legal.
So, really, WTF? We don't even need to go as deep as murder for worse stuff that's out there, if Amazon is that hell-bent on enforcing guy code morals. Why don't we just ban all novels featuring an adulterous wife, at that? It's not even slippery slope, it's exactly what they removed here.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Some narrow minded subset of the whole getting to decide what we can think about even in fantasy? And what the hell triggers this?? Did Amazon get a special request from the pope or something? Perhaps they need to invent something that means only the owners can read stories in the privacy of their own homes.... *shakes head in disgust*
They said they would not remove books remotely, but they didn't actually remove the capability to do so from the Kindle.
Palm trees and 8
Amazon. . . . oh, you mean the guys who shafted Wikileaks. The guys from whom I no longer buy anything... who cares about Amazon? I dodged a bullet on that one: I was just about to buy their Kindle and be tied to them forever.
Suppose many people find most religious texts offensive, but for some strange reason Amazon won't ban them, yet Amazon will cave to religious groups and ban materials that only the religious groups deem offensive? Religion is, after all, the most likely source of most violence and suffering in the world. Religious people have no more claim on morality than atheists. Ban nothing and let the readers decide for themselves, OR use logic and reason and ban all that is offensive to everyone. Which would you choose?
Someone tell Amazon that they missed a book. It should be removed immediately (You know, to be fair and all...)
What Amazon has done is tantamount to book burning, though it was done without fanfare and flames, their actions are no better than those of the nazi book burners or those fools in the US who burn books.
The first amendment guarantees that authors are allowed freedom of speech and that we as citizens are permitted to hear such speeches if we so choose. Amazon has demonstrated that they are no better than Joseph Goebbels and the Sturmabteilung.
I am deleting my Amazon account. I probably wouldn't be interested in Ms Kitt's writings as I stick with SciFi, but I will not support a company that tries to force their moral ideas and agenda upon me or anyone else.
Never Again.
You do realize that's how text books already work, except you have to buy the new eddeition to get the new wrong facts that you have to know to pass the test. Don't you?
Also the old facts were wrong to they were just the wrong facts that were popular before the new wrong facts emerged on the scene.
Doesn't Jeff Bezos have the right to protect his family secrets just like the rest of us?!?! Shame on you!
Hmmm.. That's a pretty wide audience though isn't it?
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It seems that people on /. are a little more offended by Jeff than they should be. It doesn't help that /. staff is allowing any crap through their filter and onto the front page due to their support of Wikileaks and Operation: Doofus.
Let's get real. The fact of the matter is that nobody is breaking into your house and destroying your books. If you buy a hardcopy book and your house burns down or you want it in a different format, can you just contact Amazon and tell them you want the different media version of it?
No - so, their hosting a book is really above and beyond the call of duty (stores like iTunes aren't nearly as generous... perhaps whine about them some). If they want to seperate themselves from certain content, then they should really have the right to do so. Just because I bought a hardcopy book from Barnes and Noble and lost it at the River doesn't mean they need to send me a copy whenever I want it for the rest of my life.
Yes, you're going to argue that digitally there is a difference. There is, but content sellers do need a way to seperate themselves from material at some point in time.
On the other hand, controls yourselves guys. You're responsible for them doing this, as it is no doubt in response to many of this communities outrage about the content that they were hosting and yet pulled Wikileaks. I've seen people on here ranting about that since the moment they yanked it and complaining of a double standard.
Okay, double standard removed, stop your whine fest.
Flowers in the Attic is still available. I guess Amazon is only killing off books that are below a certain sales threshold.
Really? So they're planning to remove The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which I'm sure everyone knows is precisely a book about incest and its consequences (not to mention rape, torture, serial murder, blackmail, and serious illegal hacking:-)
Oh wait, not. That would cost them a rather lot of money and cause an actual public ruckus as people who've paid for a bestseller see it disappear into the censor's maw. No, they are only removing books with incest in them that don't make much money! Probably without bothering to even read them.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Y'know while I am normally a supporter of the establishment I really just can't rationalize this one. Apple bans erotic content, so at least they're even handed about it. But why target one specific fantasy for its analogies to sick actions in the real world? To me that partisanship it what is going to bite them in the ass later. Even if there was a specific complaint that forced them to this action it would have been wise to hide the target better.
There are likely books that put Saw to shame with enough imagination. Sheesh, this is just all kinds of stupid. I'd like to know what prompted this action.
Thank God they proactively remove content. I wouldn't want to fall into a thought-crime trap!
Pity. Great reading. Lot. Now, *that* fellow had some great, er, family values.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
There you have it. The end.
I forgive Amazon removing 1984 from Kindles because big businesses sometimes don't know their right hand from their left, and particularly because they apologized.
Now they are liars. Kindle Store is dead to me.
from a mega company that can revoke it at any time, you sort of get what you deserve for being:
1) Stupid (i.e. Did you think this would never happen?)
2) Gullible (i.e. Did you think Amazon was going to do what they said they were going to do?)
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
All of this is why I didn't buy a kindle reader... I'd much rather trust good ol' usb mass storage...
Written 3 years ago, I present The Future of Reading.
Beetle B.
(I have a kindle, and read the manual, haven't actually bought books yet though, I'd have to formally submit myself to the eula; project gutenburg is enough for me just now)
Kindle archives are the set of all books that you have purchased, but have removed from your device. They are stored on Amazon's servers, basically, it is just the list of all books that you can re-download from them, without paying for it again.
These days to save a book you have to burn it (to another medium).
They're still selling 'Lolita' that describes both step parent/child incest and pedophilia. Is more than one author having the problem?
Banning erotica, yet they offer affiliates an entire sexshop. I know. I own one! [amoral.com] all the products on my site are from Amazon. Who would think to search Amazon for "sexual wellness"?
I finally found out what I wanted : The way they talk about their "archive" : http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_rel_topic?ie=UTF8&nodeId=200386160 The important quote is that "There are rare circumstances in which content may not remain available for re-download. For instance, if the publisher who originally made the content available to us for sale on the Kindle Store did not have the right to do so or is sued for defamation in connection with the content, we may be obligated to stop making it available for re-downloading from your library. Any copies you already have on your Kindle devices will not be affected." They are following THAT line here, except that the "rare circumstances" stated in the paragraph is about "lawyering" whereas here it is company policy" that is used. Last, their terms of use DON'T seem to mention the "Library", so may NOT be legally bound to offer that "service" or to have any constraints on such "service" ...
time to open a store of stuff that's banned by the big guys
"It's kind of a nonsensical judgment call to me in my opinion. If you have to violate laws to use what you paid for, why not get it for free in the first place?"
Because I'm not an asshole and would like to pay the author?
If you steal an and also send money to the author, that to me would be just cutting out the middleman. But what you are talking about is I think immoral as you are talking about deriving use from the work of someone who deserves to be compensated.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Jeff Bezos does not want to be reminded about what he cannot have and is in a position to do something about it. This is going to continue. Amazon removed Orwell from Kindles, censored WikiLeaks, and now this. I was absolutely right to cancel my account.
"I saw an opportunity to troll you and get you out of the woodwork.." - by gmhowell (26755) on Monday December 13, @06:56PM (#34541134) Homepage Journal
FROM -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1907528&cid=34541134
and
"I never denied trolling you. And the only person I troll under the AC banner is tomhudson." - by gmhowell (26755) on Tuesday December 14, @01:55AM (#34543612) Homepage Journal
FROM -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1907528&cid=34543612
No denying it, is there, gmhowell? After all, your own quoted words in black & white with the links you posted them in are difficult to deny now, aren't they? LMAO!
You're very stupid.
People: Don't pay this trolling douchebag gmhowell any mind, he's an incompetent out of work ignoramus who has nothing better to do than admittedly troll others here and he admits to it above in his own words quoted no less.
(Payback's a bitch, and nobody's a bigger beyotch than gmhowell, the trolling scumbag waste of life).
"I saw an opportunity to troll you and get you out of the woodwork.." - by gmhowell (26755) on Monday December 13, @06:56PM (#34541134) Homepage Journal
FROM -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1907528&cid=34541134
and here also from that same exchange/thread:
"I never denied trolling you. And the only person I troll under the AC banner is tomhudson." - by gmhowell (26755) on Tuesday December 14, @01:55AM (#34543612) Homepage Journal
FROM -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1907528&cid=34543612
No denying it, is there, gmhowell? After all, your own quoted words in black & white with the links you posted them in are difficult to deny now, aren't they? LMAO!
You're very stupid.
People: Don't pay this trolling douchebag gmhowell any mind, he's an incompetent out of work ignoramus who has nothing better to do than admittedly troll others here and he admits to it above in his own words quoted no less.
(Payback's a bitch, and nobody's a bigger beyotch than gmhowell, the trolling scumbag waste of life).
yeah..too ad it happened because people refused to rape innocents. But hey, lets not let facts get int he way of a story where Innocent children are killed by god. The contexts the 'know them' means sex was added much latter to try and stem homosexual activity in monasteries.
remember, the 'Hero' of this story offers his children up to be raped because he didn't want the towns people to meet the angels.
Anyone who actually studies the Bible's history and context of the stories can only conclude that it was about hospitality, not rap, not homosexuality. But no, keep quoting the Bible out of all context and ignore the changes that have been done to the text for political and social reason.
I read in a bible the Titans once roamed the earth, this also must be literally true. It was in a bible.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
When a book entitled "Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure" was first contested by the public, Amazon said that it was protected by free speech. It seems they've changed their tune... I just looked, and that book is gone from the site as well.
Stop blaming the victim. It's Amazon's fault if a book goes away. Your attitude is the exact same one that allows this kind of shit to go on.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
And the bible. All that stuff with Lot and his two daughters getting it on and doing the nasty.
Will Saletan of Slate will find this horrible, because he's apparently all for incest: http://www.slate.com/id/2277787/
IFF this is for real,
This means they will pull Infinite Jest , which talks about incest, from the store. If they had only done this earlier, I would be $9 richer, and have about 1 month of my life back.
They are pulling the bible off the store; aren't they? Good Riddance. We need to make the world safe for Christians everywhere. Dirty books lead to dirty deeds.
-Thanks.
I'm laughing so hard right now at anyone who continued to buy ebooks from amazon after the 1984 incident. This whole thing makes me a little reluctant to even consider buying any gadget with this kind of purchase-direct-to-the-device capability. If the manufacturer can send an e-book to your device over the air, they can send a kill switch; and as Amazon has demonstrated, if they have the capability they will find a reason to use it.
I've been on the "don't buy it until I know I can burn full custom ROMs" policy for awhile now, precisely because of problems like this.
This is hardly Amazon's first sin.
In April 2009 pretty much all of their GLBT titles disappeared. After a loud outcry Amazon restored them, claiming that it was all the result of some unspecificed, but very specific, glitch.
Later that year purchased titles were deleted from Kindles because of a copyright cock-up.
A few months ago suggestive bookcovers suddenly disappeared from the most commonly used All Departments search. While the books remained available and could be found with specific drill-down searching techniques, most people would never know to try that.
Now the removal of fictional adult topies. And just like the other censorship episodes, Amazon remains completely mum about what they are doing, why they are doing it, or what can be done to work with whatever undisclosed guidlines they are now operating under.
It's all enough to make one cheer Google Books arrival on the scene as an equal sized competitor.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Nicely written and very moving ... but moving to where? What are we to do about it? At the local and state level, protests and talking to representatives can be quite effective, but at the federal level no so much(*). As an average man with a busy life to live, what specifically am I supposed to do?
(*) Corollary: Restricted federal power and more state power makes it easier for citizens to be involved. See the far to little practiced Principal of Subsidiarity.
they dont. for any anti cartel activity to take action, it needs to be proven that those co.s are acting together, in contact. if, they are just 'adjusting according to the market demands', without having any direct contact with each other, in the way how music industry fixes cd prices, nothing happens.
Read radical news here
http://baen.com/library/
A large fraction of the stuff baen publishes (sci-fi/fantasy, mostly) is available direct from them for free, in open formats (html and RTF are usable by almost everything, and there are some less-open but possibly better-looking formats if you prefer those). Download some for yourself, it'll save you a lot of time!
Many of their dead-trees hardcovers these days also come with a bonus CD that includes that book, other books in the same series or by the same author, and bonus stuff. Very worthwhile.
I particularly recommend the stuff by Bujold; Niven, Pournell, and Ringo are also good. And a couple dozen others are there if your taste is different than mine!
If Amazon didn't comment, how do we know why the book was banned? I'm saying banned here because they didn't remove it from Kindles as promised in the court settlement about 1984. Is it just because the incest is most likely to fall under some "otherwise objectionable material" clause?
Assuming that Amazon tries to apply such a clause, can I let Amazon know what else I find objectionable? If enough people agree, will Amazon eventually remove such titles?
Oh come on, Amazon just saw the lull created by Anonymous' failure to take down their servers. They saw that Christmas is right around the corner, and wanted to give themselves a nice kick, just to show that Amazon can kick its own ass, thank you very much!
If you went to a book store had bought a book. And then letter that year went there and they no longer carried it, would you refuse to ever buy there again? Is every books store supposed to sell every title they had ever sold? Cause that's what happened. There not removing them from the kindle devices.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Has this actually been confirmed, or is this just someone posting a fake article? Is there anyone who has noticed these books disappearing, an alternate news article, or some secondary source? It could just be someone yanking your chain.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
For the very obvious reason that you don't own an eBook. When you buy a real book, you own that copy. When you buy an eBook, you are buying a license - that can be taken away. Add to that fact is that your real book never breaks, isn't tied to a cloud that disappears after a few years, and can be loaned out, given away or sold with impunity. And you don't need special software, or hardware, to read it (that gets obsoleted the very next year). I hate killing trees - almost as much as paying slightly less for something that affords me zero rights.
I seem to recall that Ridley Scott's Gladiator featured incest.
You obviously haven't been reading anything on Texas' rewrite of some contents of text books, never mind a lot of the rest of the south, nor the whining screams from a lot of people that *their* revisionist history was never revisionist, but the actual, fact based, documented, you know, with actual evidence, history finding its way in on "some" subjects is what is a) unpatriotic, b) un-American and, c) revisionist. Its been happening since the day the concept of, "History is written by the winners.", was first invented. The only difference now is that some groups have gotten really confused by the last word there, and substituted 'whiners'. Not surprising, given how often they write and spell badly, or the fact that the home of the Creation Museum, and soon, the Noah's Ark theme park, is #1 in education, in a country that grades a C- on tests of everything from reading comprehension, to science, and even math, and is like the 15th place world wide (or maybe its 20th?). Its so easy to misplace an 'n', then accidentally stick a bit longer tail on the thing, and then all hell breaks out... lol
Oh no, are they pulling my copy of Oedipus Rex?
I fear a complex coming on.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
N.B. I thought I made a mistake once, but I was mistaken.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Oddly enough, if a book is good, I only read one at a time. Why would I need 4500 in my pocket. That would be like carrying 2 condoms... hopelessly optimistic.
Can you snif your new book, break it open? Scribe notes on it? Have it signed? Pass it on to your children? Hold the book your mother read to you and now you read to your kids?
And it would have to be a very small library for it to have just a couple thousand books. Does your ebook come with a kids corner? A librarian who does know that title of the book with that blue cover and it had this guy who met this girl you read 20 years ago? Does it have books you would never read but pick up because well you are there?
You are comparing a loving wife to a cow milking machine. Both might get you off, but geez, I can tell you the experience is just not the same.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
They AREN'T removing books from people's kindles. The book just won't be in the archive any more. So the buyer should back up the book file on their computer (from their kindle).
I've spent months researching eReaders, trying to decide which one to get. Luckily, this has made the decision easy. It's a Nook for me.
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