It seems I'm not the only person to have missed references to erotica. A British national newspaper pointed out, or exposed in the parlance of the industry, that WH Smith, a stalwart bookseller of the British high street and the internet was selling erotica on its website. It answered a question I asked myself in passing some time ago but never bothered to research.
You see, Smashwords, the eBook aggregator that supplies self published books to Apple, Sony, Kobo (and by inference WH Smith as they have tapped into Kobo's catalogue) and Barnes& Noble, to name a few, has forged a home for erotica books alongside many other genres. Now I don't write or read erotica, but I don't judge those who choose to either. It's just not my bag. My guess is that if Smashwords hadn't become the distributer of eBooks that it has then it would have faded into insignificance as a niche seller of erotica books by now. What Kobo may or may not have realised and WH Smith clearly didn't was that once the authors of the erotica market had achieved the formatting standards required by Smashwords their books were eligible to be shipped to all of the above eBook sellers unless they excluded them themselves. Apple realised this about a year ago and started to vet the content of the eBooks they took from Smashwords. This was a very public happening that Kobo and WH Smith should have been aware of but clearly didn't think it worthy of following, possibly because it requires effort and therefore costs money.
Now WH Smith have been outed by the newspaper they have taken their eBook store down completely, Kobo have removed a lot of eBooks, possibly everything they have received via Smashwords. I haven't carried out a lot of research (spotting a pattern here?), but I can confirm that my books, which do not contain erotica, have disappeared from Kobo. My guess is that once W H Smith have identified all of the self published books, regardless of content, then they'll restore their eBookstore. Which means that they'll resume selling 50 shades (originally a self published book) and of course the Hitch Hikers Guide, along with its harmless references to the triple breasted whore. They will stop lots of erotica being available, and that's fine, but many other good books are going to be blocked from the public.
Smashwords owner, Mark Coker, is understandably outraged by the reaction. I'm actually surprised it has taken this long to come to a head. The self published phenomenon has trundled along unregulated for quite a while. It has challenged the established publishing industry and caused it to take stock. That is healthy, the old way of working wasn't moving literature forward as well as it could and the prices were, and to some degree remain, too expensive. But one price has been the lack of control over self published books. Apple have taken some control over this matter; it's time the other eBook sellers do so too.
Taking all the books off sale should be, at most, a short term solution. While I agree that under the current paradigm, like the one it left behind, good, well written books may or may not be successful but in general badly written books of any genre should fail. The issues around the subject matter of some books being objectionable to people need to be addressed - the young and the vulnerable especially should be protected from inadvertent exposure and WH Smith is right to want to remove them from their catalogue, but it's really important that a sense of perspective is maintained. Smashwords is looking at a voluntary metadata process where authors declare if their book is unlikely to be suitable for Apple or Kobo. I think this is pie in the sky - some authors may play ball, but some, perhaps many, might ignore it. Also, I suspect that Sony and B&N may go down this route sometime soon.
What I suspect Smashwords needs to do is what Apple have been doing - adding a vetting process to all books before they accept them in their premium catalogue. I'm sure most of this could be automated with perhaps a process for the public to alert them to books that have slipped through. Then they can earmark any books that contain offensive (to some) subject matter - we're talking about incest, rape and other unpleasant subjects here. They can then alert any resellers who want to limit their exposure to corporate risk who want to avoid these books. They could also dispense of the prude filter they put on their website and just keep such books corralled in a subsection that potential readers have to overtly access. That way, trust in the self published book industry would be restored and newspapers would be free to move on to something else to disrupt.
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