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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...
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
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!
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.
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
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.
My god man, can you imagine what a Constitution written in this politically-correct, image-driven, vagina-babble, lawyer-laden, market-speak, victim-mentality, feel-good, safety-at-all-costs, focus-on-the-nonessential, yada-yada-yada day and age would look like? Shit, the preamble would run 200 pages, and wouldn't say a damn thing.
That said, I still say we kill all the lawyers and MBAs.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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
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."
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.
A step to "Fahrenheit 451". I already deleted my Amazon account.
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.
No, you're confused, there would be no end of people arguing that we need clarity and consistency. I have no problem with a company selling me a limited license to read their books on a temporary basis that they can withdraw at any time IF they market it as that. If they market it as me buying the book then that implies ownership and property rights. By all means let Amazon sell such licenses and make it clear that the content is theirs and they can arbitarily remove it whenever they want, it makes it all the simpler for me to find a vendor who is willing to actually sell me something I then have rights to.
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.
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
and i'd like to be able to carry several books around for the weight of one.
Well, Amazon does still sell backpacks and energy pills! ;}
LOL, how is this post insightful in any way?
And saying "we kill all lawyers and MBAs"... gets a 4 rating.
This shows what the average dumb fuck mod here on /. has going on in their brains.
Go ahead and mod me down idiots, I have a little Karma to blow on that.
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.
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
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.