Amazon Taking Down Erotica, Removing From Kindles
theselfpublishingrevolution.blogspot.com
theselfpublishingrevolution.blogspot.com
Amazon should feel free to yank whatever it wants off its bookshelves (and, in fact, should probably be a bit more discerning given some of the recent crap they've been selling) - but, I don't know if they should be sending their customers _already purchased_ books into the memory hole.
My girlfriend and I occasionally share books (usually she borrows mine), but my understanding is that the books you "buy" are licensed only to a single device, and you can only share a book one time, and even then only if the publisher allows it.
I could be misunderstanding things, but it seems like if she wanted to borrow one of my books, she would probably need to borrow my Kindle to do it, and essentially borrow all of my books to read one.
Until things get sorted out, I think I'll pass on the eReaders.
You don't have to deprive yourself of e-readers. I am completely happy with O'Reilly's and Pragmatic's policy (no DRM, multi-format). I am a little less happy with Manning, who makes it clear my book is only available for download for the 5 days following purchase. All of them offer DRM-free PDF as a minimum. I am so far very happy with my Nook (B&W e-paper version).
And there is also Feddbooks, which is conveniently linked from Stanza (I have it on my iPod)
Oh. And after the 1984 episode, it would be hard to convince me to buy a Kindle.
I don't really need an eReader for programming books. Most of the time I'm better off reading those at the computer where I can play with the code in them. For that, I can just buy the PDF and read it in Foxit.
I'd want an eReader more for fiction, and fiction definitely still prefers DRM over non-DRM.
So far, I find the Pragmatic and O'Reilly ebooks to be pretty nice on Kindle. Code examples don't always look super. But I sometimes landscape the view (especially on pdfs) and it's much better.
But I also tend to read and hack separately anymore these days - reading to drink the bigger picture, then hack and use Google as my language reference . . .
I think a good market for this is in areas with long, public transportation commutes. Those who take the car to work have fewer good use cases for e-readers.
You expect them to provide you with the ability to download the book any time you want, but you don't want them to ask you to pay a license fee. Sounds like you'd like the benefits of a license (someone else handles storing the media) without the tradeoff (someone else has control of the media). Doesn't seem fair to the publisher.
Amazon allows you to read a book on up to six Kindles (or Kindle compatible devices such as iPhones / iPads).
It can be a bit fiddly (the easiest thing would be for you and your girlfriend to share a single account) but it's doable.
I would not do it, since I don't want to financially help anyone who sells DRM. I would like to see a DRM-free world. That's not going to happen if I pay for it.
It does depend on your reading interests, but one big difference between books and audiovisual content is that there is an enormous selection of books that are out of copyright. If you like to read those, you can obtain them for free and without DRM from sites like Project Gutenberg.
> Until things get sorted out, I think I'll pass on the eReaders.
It's never going to get "sorted out". From the perspective of the retailers, this is a good thing. It allows them to make more money. Why would they ever change their policies?
My Kindle is still content to read all of the titles I've stripped, although usually I stick to the DRM'd versions on-device to allow Whispersync between that and my iPhone.
I think Amazon (and any bookseller) should be allowed to sell or not sell any sort of book they want. However deleting already paid for books that your customers have bought from their devices is totally unethical IMO.
(warning: strong language)
I'd love to know if someone's actually run a scam like that at some point. Seems like a clever hack, at least it would be before the days of ubiquitous credit cards and online banking.
Not sure if it was original when included in the script or not.
At least according to this: http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/amazon-removes-incest-related...
http://consumerist.com/2009/07/how-to-load-up-your-kindle-wi...
Whether root access is readily available on a Kindle is unclear to me.
Conceivably, with a court order, they could compel your Kindle to tell them what books you have been reading and, given it's 3G capabilities, where you have been.
It's really not your Kindle. You just paid for it.
The thing that stops Amazon doing it is the same thing that stops them doing it - it would be commercial suicide to do so.
I happen not to use Windows, so I don't download software from "any software vendor" and most of what I download was peer-reviewed at the source level. Not to say nothing bad ever happened (Debian's SSH keygen comes to mind), but, most of the time, it was caught before it did any relevant damage.
> How is a Kindle any different?
Amazon already deleted content users purchased without their consent. That proves, without any doubt, there is at least one backdoor Amazon can use to delete content from your device. Did anyone review Amazon's code to make sure there are no other backdoors?
> it would be commercial suicide to do so.
Have you ever seen a WGA false-alarm?
WGA false alarms are collateral damage (and tend to get resolved very quickly in my personal experience), what you're suggesting by them bricking a device is a very different thing - willingly damaging something with the sole intent of doing so and in all probability no intention of undoing it.
No. It's trusting someone who has no conflict of interest with you. Amazon wants as much revenue from you as they can extract without making you switch. You want as much benefit you can get with little regard to Amazon's profits. By owning content that can only be experienced through channels they control, your cost of switching is higher and so are the margins they can impose on you.
> because I believe their commercial imperative to behave reasonably is a strong enough incentive
Deleting content users paid for? Removing books they find questionable from a user library? Surely you are not serious.
> WGA false alarms are collateral damage (and tend to get resolved very quickly
Last time I saw it happen, a total of 45 minutes on the phone over about 4 hours. The sticker on the machine was for Windows 2000 and it took the user some time to find the original XP packaging.
That was the last Windows that user (a then colleague of mine) ever used.
Before I judge them on this I'm keen to hear their take on it. At the moment we have anecdotal evidence from someone who has an interest. If for instance Amazon had discovered the content violated certain laws that would be reasonable I'd suggest.
But you talk about it as if this is routine which is clearly a long way from the truth. I repeat, they're in the business of selling books. How many books will they sell if they keep deleting them?
Besides, if you're that bothered you can back up everything you own. If they delete the item then convert it to a different format and restore it. Yes it's work but so is Linux and you seem to think that's a reasonable effort to put into protecting yourself from this sort of thing.
My original point is that Amazon has complete control over the Kindle you paid for. They can delete books as they wish and I would not be surprised if, upon proper court order, track your reading habits and/or your physical location.
Mine is that 99.999% of the time they won't.
Almost all limits on people's behaviour in society aren't around what they can or can't do, they're around what they will or won't do. If you annoy me I can stab you but I don't because society is structured such that it isn't in my interest to do so.
Behaviour isn't primarily only controlled by what's possible, it's controlled by what's rewarded and punished.
The same mechanism that prevents you from being a victim of random stabbing means that while in principal your eBooks are vulnerable, in practice they're safe.
This is one company that "gets it", and I recommend them enthusiastically.
Can't have it all, I spose.
> Amazon effectively acknowledged that the deletions were a bad idea. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,” Mr. Herdener said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18ama...
just as is the inability of so many to recognize that it is exactly the same when wikileaks is refused a right to be published via server space
you "debaters" should be ashamed of yourselves...but you won't be. i don't fully understand that part. is it really that hard to see the shape of the nation? the commerce infrastructure? the war, imperialism, peonage, acquiescence to abuses in the name of stability and financial growth.
yet nazis DID exist, and nazis DO exists, and the more often Godwin's crock of a law is pompously imposed the more will exist. ask yourself: how did they exist? were the german middle class simply naturally evil spawn of the devil children waiting to grow up and be spawn of the devil killers? how did they rise? not some macro view, a micro view. how did the middle class of a western nation create the nazi's military machine?
have you considered that they were propagandized? and how did that occur? why was information lacking? is it possible that information was suppressed? who suppressed it?
you are not immune to the very same information deficit which you endorse. you are not immune to the very same fear which envelops the nation.
but you say, "this is incest, i just don't like incest". well, there's lots of things you might not like. perhaps for example consider that 80-90% of you are not gay. presumably you don't read gay fiction. why are gays allowed to have a deviation from your norm while you are selectively willing to determine another deviation from your norm eligible for suppression? try to keep in mind that your cultural norm is a shockingly violent culture filled with shocking amounts of violent fantasy. "oh but i don't like violent fantasy". yeah right, i'm talking to the other 99.9% of you then.
you <--- yes you, reading this, are the middle-class of a western nation with quite a track record, and one that is only getting worse and so very very quickly year upon year of this century.
what questions will people ask 70 years from now to try to understand you. the middle-class "debaters"
metaphors are a powerful force against natural difficulty to place events into context. i would say you're only hurting yourselves, but actually you're hurting us all. You.
Since the original article is sex, and you refered to it above, let's continue with it. Try going to an SA (sex addicts) meeting sometime and hear about shattered lives because of what someone did to someone else. I'm going to put my foot down and say rape is bad because of the horrible emotional baggage it leaves in someone's life. Incest is usually in the same category (I personally know a guy who will never have normal relationships because of what his older sister and friend did with him when he was 12).
I'm sure someone (you?) will try to argue there are cases where it's OK, so we shouldn't call rape 'bad'. PLEASE! Sometimes, there ARE things that should be suppressed.
And this doesn't mean anything or everything should be suppressed. If people are suppressing/hiding something because they did wrong (the government) then it should be exposed.
Except, whoops, we just said the government did 'wrong'. That's a value judgement! <sarcasm>Maybe some people think starting fake wars is OK and we shouldn't be so quick to call that unsavory</sarcasm> Value judgements have to be made as long as we're human. Value judgements mean there is 'good' and 'bad'. I don't think we want more 'bad' -- it's bad by definition! If we ever get to the point that we're computers and can hit a reset button, then _maybe_ right and wrong will go away...
So wikileaks and exposing corruption -- good, bring it on, don't suppress it. Encouraging rape or incest, I'm calling bad -- we don't need more of that in society.
(OK, bring on the down votes)
There are all sorts of films and books that show crime being committed, sometimes even with the criminals being the good guys. These obviously shouldn't be banned - but the crimes depicted probably should be.
"we can't all agree on what is bad, therefore nothing is bad"
I don't think the parent was arguing for that, indeed I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who truly believes that. He talks exclusively about ideas and fiction.
On a final note its not very classy to 'bait' people to downvote you. It's the reason that I didn't upvote you.
rape is coercion. good luck on that correlation. if incest is psychologically or physically coerced then it rape as well
incest has a negative physical effect on society as far as i understand it, but i am no expert. it does appear to be a wise for society to ban and even discourage the practice. there is no claim here that all ideas are of equal value. however, it is the expression of the idea which i am discussing, not the value, not the practice.
incest, as you say, may also have negative psychological consequences. however i could make a case that those are because of society, again i am no expert, and that does not diminish the potential social value of discouraging it. in fact i could make the case that despite the big picture problem we're discussing on the individual level the psychological problems induced by over-reactions are a downside to our collective discouragement of the practice. there's no free lunch. and sometimes the lunch costs too much, for example, how many tens of thousands of people are in prison for smoking a herb? society isn't always right (duh). that's why we defend freedom of expression. we don't know what we don't know that we don't know. ;)
again: rape is coercion, and it is expression & not practice or value which i am discussing.
to defend freedom of expression we must defend expression of ideas odious to us (nothing is universally odious). but hey, that's freedom 101, not sure why it needs reminding
and to veer in a different direction: it's also worthwhile to consider that all of the above occur frequently in literature & pulp. i'll venture to guess that rape occurs by far the most. the intellectual age has long passed wherein entertainment containing apparently negative representations of such things can be considered without considering the appetite of the audience. if we make value statements then let's try not be delusional about audience participation (i'm not saying you claim otherwise, just throwing this in the mix)
also: let's not get caught up on blaming the government for oppression, a common thread in all these discussions. amazon doesn't get a free pass by being private. power is power that affects me & you regardless where we shop. the texas board of education censors the ideas available in most american schools via the commercial apparatus of mass production aka efficiency. last i checked i don't live in texas either.
Here we go: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jul/24/amazon...
> A discussion thread on Amazon’s Kindle Community forum notes that Amazon has begun removing some previously-published books or stories from its store, and from the Kindle archives. Readers who have previously downloaded them to their Kindles can keep them there, but cannot re-download them (and will be refunded the price of purchase assuming Amazon can still find the purchase record).
http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/amazon-removes-incest-related... (linked from the submitted story)
But it looks like it's not available on Kindle either, now that I check :)
http://www.amazon.com/Ada-Ardor-Chronicle-Vladimir-Nabokov/d...
I wouldn't sell incest erotica either, and that doesn't mean I ban or censor books.
This kind of exaggeration on the part of the blog author doesn't help her argument; it just causes people to (a) lose intellectual respect for the author and (b) give less credence to her argument.
Going by that logic, to "effectively" ban the book while not "technically" banning it, the govt just needs to pursue the top few channels to stop carrying it. Book will be effectively unavailable and everyone's conscience will be clean.
> I wouldn't sell incest erotica either, and that doesn't mean I ban or censor books.
But you would make that clear to everyone before starting to do business with them, right? Or if you decided to change your stand one day (which is quite plausible since things do change with time), you would perhaps offer a better reason then "Because I can"?
Hey, that sounds familiar. Say, for example, that some organization releases a bunch of more or less secret stuff, and you want to prevent them from getting donations to continue releasing stuff, you could just lean a bit on VISA and Mastercard…
The government didn't tell Amazon to stop carrying the book, so your point is irrelevant.
> But you would...
Well I haven't really thought about that, because in reading the post, I was just distracted by the exaggeration that I pointed out in my original comment.
By being knocked out of the store, the author loses easier access to readers, and payment processing. But the author is not blocked from publishing and getting his or her work on the kindle through routes other than Amazon.
Maybe you should expand your horizons. grin -- The Author
Ok, I'm all for trying new things and all, but the world-wide cultural taboo against incest exists for a clearly defined reason (ref: Alexei Nikolaevich, for example), not just because we're all a buncha prudes.
With freely-available contraception and abortion, it's hard to think of any good reason for the absolute cultural taboo against all incest.
One of the goals of literature should be to challenge cultural taboos. Any good bookseller should realize it.
It is worth noting though that cultural mores don't work well with shades of grey- they are best suited to black-and-whites. (i.e. do/don't instead of do this way/don't do that way)
And, you know, child rape by a family member. Which is probably, by far, the most common form of incest.
Of course it does. In other news, shooting people in the streets is generally considered bad, yet if you read a few thrillers and watch a few action movies, there will be gun battles. Fiction and real life: not the same.
Consider this. In certain northern states of India, marriages or relationships within the same village are considered incest and draw very violent reactions ( even leading to deaths). There is a very strong demand to make it into a law. On the other hand, in certain southern states and in some communities in north as well, it is perfectly fine to get married to a cousin from your mother's side.
Amazon is not taking down erotica. They still have a very large and healthy erotica/romance section.
What they are doing is removing incest-erotica published by Amazon's Createspace. According to the pages the author links to in his post, incest-erotica from other publishers remains available for sale.
Incest, by the way, is illegal in most of America, except possibly in the South. It's no different from Amazon removing bestiality-erotica or pedophilia-erotica published under its own label.
Long story short: if you want to publish incest-erotica, don't publish through Amazon's CreateSpace.
Amazon made a business decision to stop publishing incest-erotica through its own publishing label. It did not ban other publishers from publishing that crap in its store.
(Anyone familiar with the origins of the phrase should see the irony immediately)
Frankly I think it's kind of ridiculous to propose you can't ever give one grimy, muddy, bloodstained inch without being overrun. Niemöller was right, but it doesn't universally apply to EVERY case...
I don't mind Amazon choosing what it does and does not sell on their store. But as a Kindle owner, the remote deletion does worry me, even though I knew it was part of the deal when I bought the Kindle. Even worse that apparently when she complained, she was insulted for her choice of book. That's not so many steps away from reporting owners of banned books to some superior power.
Yet, what reason would we have to give this one, grimy, muddy, bloodstained inch?
Besides, Niemoller's point (though in this case unnecessarily melodramatic) is valid here. There is no shortage of sexual kinks in this world that will shock and/or disgust many. There's also no particular rhyme nor reason why this one was targeted over any other, and as such there's no reason to expect that other suitably controversial kinks aren't at risk of having its fiction banned.
The puzzling thing is why so many people are quick to judge and raise moral outrage over something that has absolutely no effect on themselves (the reading of fiction). It reeks of puritanism.
Child-molestation erotica is reason enough. They can distribute it as torrents, FFS.
Everyone's a freak and a weirdo, and the sooner we lay off other people for their kinks the sooner we may find acceptance for our own.
If I were running a store, I wouldn't want to sell baby rape erotica. I wouldn't want to make money that way. If people want to spank to that stuff, it's not my responsibility to assist in any way.