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Amazon Removes Yaoi Manga Titles From Kindle Store
Repossessed writes "Amazon is now cracking down on Yaoi manga, with several titles that have been available on the Kindle since 2009 being delisted and others now being rejected, according to Digital Manga Publisher. DMP has also stated that Amazon has not given any rationale for the rejections and removals, and Amazon has not been answering emails or phone calls from journalists asking about the subject."
This was always the paradox of ebooks. By every measure, ebooks should have the first thing that easily came to the computer. Files sizes were small and text was one of the first things reasonably conquered by computers. In the early days, sound cards were necessary to play music, video files were just goddamned intensive.... and yet as a medium, books came last after everything else.
Now, we're stuck with Amazon/Apple being the central distributors, they're start going to decide more and more on content for whatever reason. At least music players, you can load it up as an mp3 file and there are several music stores online to choose from. Even Apple managed to talk RIAA out of DRM. But publishers are going to be signing their own death warrant, building up their masters for the immediate (and false) security of DRM.
I love things in a digital format. But I really, really hate how the distribution model is playing out. This is the eBay model. One central place, it's convenient in some ways, but you play by their rules or you don't play at all, and if they decide to fuck you, they really fuck you.
We need to get away from the eBay model from these greedy ass companies, or it's going to be a damned bleak and bland future. We need to move over to the google shopping model, decentralized and seperate stores/vendor offering their wares connected by an neutraol aggregator (which lets people review service) and a whitelist for the cautious type.
I'm getting really sick of the direction these gadgets are heading.
Where do people go when they give up Amazon?
Back to paper books? I can think of half a dozen independent book stores within walking distance of my home, and I am in a medium sized town.
Palm trees and 8
After Amazon remotely deleted 1984 (ironic to say the least), this is no surprise. It would be akin to a book seller breaking into one's home to take back a book one had already bought; "licensed" is the loophole Amazon and other on-line book sellers uses to get around the 1st sale doctrine to restrict, or even often forbid, resale, sharing, etc.
More to the point, the 1984 incident illustrated well that Kindles, much like many mobile devices, are designed with remote deletion in mind - there was an article on here the other day about Google remotely deleting apps.
While Amazon supposedly agreed they will refrain from utilizing remote deletion in the future, the feature still exists. On a related note, even if the device out of the box doesn't support remote deletion, any device that accepts software updates with little (ie. Bluray players; inserting a disc) to no user intervention (mobile phones) can easily be programmed to remotely restrict / delete / self-destruct.
Among the best defenses against remote deletion / restrictions are widely used, non-DRM formats that can be easily copied and widely distributed, as well as, easily compared / verified to ensure the contents haven't changed...
To digress a tad, it's only a matter of time, assuming it's not already happened, before some company, such as Amazon, doesn't remotely delete a book, but rather silently modifies some of the content *after* purchase without telling the customer.
Ron
Then your medium-sized town is an exception.
If a fictional book is created, sold and read, illustrated or not, about a bank heist, no one is stealing; nothing has been stolen; it is fiction. A work of imagination. For entertainment purposes.
The same applies to interactions such as those found in Lolita, Yaoi titles, the Story of O, Exit to Eden, Belinda, and so on for quite a long list written over an impressive span of time (erotica is hardly unique to the 20th and 21st centuries.)
That said, there is no question that as a venue for selling products, the seller has the right to choose what products they will sell; all that remains is for the customers to decide if those choices make them more or less likely to shop there.
Finally, an interesting reality of our society is summed up by the phrase "the squeaky wheel gets the grease." If you wish to apply legitimate pressure encouraging Amazon to carry all titles without making content-based cullings, simply contact them, tell them so, and indicate that your future purchasing plans will vary depending on Amazon's behavior here. And then follow through.
I would suggest that this is worth doing; today, it's something you probably don't care if you ever see. Tomorrow, it may be something you do care about. Ideally, a venue for buying e-books would, as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has claimed is their goal, carry every book, no matter what content.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Not all subjects are fine at all ages. Reading some topics, or viewing some materials at too young an age really can harm a child psychologically, introduce them to concepts their mind isn't mature enough to handle yet and the results can be quite harmful.
Which subjects? Please cite studies.
Europe and many other countries around the world seem perfectly fine despite being very open about nudity. In fact, they'd probably claim the US is a degenerate bunch of Neanderthals for how much violence we allow our children to see.
So which standard are you using? Is nudity okay for your children as many Europeans would claim or is violence okay as many Americans would claim? Which one is based on science and which one is based on arbitrary cultural views? Well?
In reality, a rating system compresses a very complex multi-dimensional set of movie descriptors into a single axis. No matter how much you may delude yourself into thinking there is science behind how it's done, there isn't. It's an arbitrary choice based on culture. Not your culture, btw, but that of whomever makes the decision on the rating.
"Can't say I'll miss porn written for schoolgirls..."
But that's just where it starts.* I don't want to misapply Martin Niemöller's "first they came for the Jews...." quote here, because he was talking about something even worse than censorship, but the principle is the same. If you wait until they get around to affecting you directly, that's way too late. Regardless of what one thinks of these graphic novels (which are the male/male equivalent of disposable paperback romance novels), it should be alarming that the world's largest book seller is removing them from the world's largest e-bookstore. If you have any "guilty pleasures" at all in your entertainment choices (gross-out movies, violent action films, slasher videos, "edgy" comedians, any variety of porn), keep in mind that there are people who want to suppress those too. So it should be important to you – personally – to stop them long before they get there.
*Actually it started (as far as I've heard) with erotic novels that contained the word "rape" in the title. Amazon's been quietly disappearing books from the Kindle store for a while now.
"Where do people go when they give up Amazon?"
Barnes and Noble would be the closest equivalent, both in terms of online dead-tree retailing and a good ebook/reader system. I haven't heard of them pulling books from that system based on someone disapproving of the content. At least not yet.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Where do people go when they give up Amazon?
Back to paper books? I can think of half a dozen independent book stores within walking distance of my home, and I am in a medium sized town.
You've either got a different definition of "medium sized town" than I do... Or you've very lucky.
I also live in what I'd call a "medium sized town"... Biggish for a town, but absolutely nothing you could call a city. We have a Borders, and a used bookstore downtown.
Borders is becoming less and less of a book store every day. They've got more movies and music and calendars and coffee in there than books already. And the books they do have are a lousy selection. I don't remember the last time I went in there looking for a book that wasn't on a current best seller list and actually found it.
Yes, if the stars align just right, you can find some awesome stuff at the used bookstore... But more often than not they've just got used copies of the same stuff that Borders is carrying. Cheaper, sure, but I don't want to read it anyway.
There's a library of course... And they're terrific for some of the older/classic stuff... And reference materials... But they don't generally have newer stuff available. Either they don't have a copy, or the one copy is perpetually loaned out to someone.
All of which means that I do most of my book shopping on-line.
I bought a nook largely because I am impatient. I can buy a book on-line and have it download to my nook within a minute or two. And I can even make purchases through the nook itself, so I don't need to be sitting in front of a computer. Makes it much easier to get my hands on decent reading material. Almost makes it seem like I'm not living in the ass-end of nowhere.
Now, I went with a nook at least in part because of the crap that Amazon has been doing with their Kindle. So I am unaffected by Amazon's decisions right now. But there are a lot of folks out there with Kindles who are affected by these decisions. Who were using Amazon and the Kindle to gain access to reading material that just isn't available in their local area. Especially if we're talking about erotica and/or pornography. It's virtually impossible to find a good selection of erotica/pornography outside of a large city.
Alright... So you're going to go back to paper books purchased from any one of a half-dozen independant book stores within walking distance of your home in a medium sized town...
So, where do the rest of us go?
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde