Over the past few days, Amazon has been deleting some of the more popular erotica titles from its Kindle and non-Kindle stores. It appears to be targeting titles that, for the most part at least, contain some fairly “extreme” subject matter, such as incest. Both self-published titles and titles from professional publishers have been deleted. It’s also clear that they’re specifically going after popular and successful erotica titles.

Affected parties include myself, Selena Kitt, Jess C Scott and several other independent authors. Some books from the publishing house Olympia Press have also been deleted.

This story has been reported on in this TeleRead article and this blog post by Selena Kitt. (Contrary to the TeleRead article title, we now know that it isn’t just incest-themed books that are being removed.) This Facebook page has been started to follow the story.

Author/publishers who have had their books deleted receive a form email stating: “your title contains content that is in violation of our content guidelines. As a result, we have removed the book from our store.” The “guidelines” referred to have this to say about prohibited erotic content:

    Pornography

    Pornography and hard-core material that depicts graphic sexual acts.

That’s all. Not a single word more than that. Furthermore, Amazon’s email goes on to make this threat: “if you continue to submit content that violates our content guidelines, we may conduct a general review of your account.  Actions resulting from such a review could result in a termination of your account.” In other words, if you don’t obey our impossibly-vague “guidelines,” we may ban you from the Kindle store.

One interesting aspect of all this is that so far, relatively few books have been deleted. I don’t have firm numbers, but it seems to be a  few dozen at most. There are literally thousands of books on Amazon with content as extreme, or more so, than the books that have been deleted. The most likely explanation seems to be that Amazon is deliberately proceeding slowly with a new policy; targeting a few successful erotica titles to gauge public reaction.

My opinion:

Does Amazon have the legal right to do this? Of course; they’re a commercial enterprise, not a government institution. If they wanted to, they could decide tomorrow that they’re only going to carry books about bunny rabbits and Rosicrucians.

Does Amazon have the moral right to do this? Of course not. They do not belong in the business of deciding for you which books are “appropriate” for you to read and which aren’t.

If you have an opinion you want to share with Amazon, please send it to Amazon’s Executive Customer Relations department: ecr@amazon.com.

What I’m going to do:

For the time being, I’m going to work on making my titles available through Smashwords. This company distributes ebooks in a variety of formats, including Kindle. I don’t know if the sales I get through Smashwords will be sufficient for it to be worth my while to continue writing erotica. Neither do I know if Amazon is going to pursue this policy (its logical continuation will require deleting thousands of books), or let it fizzle out, or (fingers crossed) totally back-peddle on it.