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Old 12-15-2010, 09:25 AM   #34
Ken Irving
Writer
Ken Irving has read every ebook posted at MobileReadKen Irving has read every ebook posted at MobileReadKen Irving has read every ebook posted at MobileReadKen Irving has read every ebook posted at MobileReadKen Irving has read every ebook posted at MobileReadKen Irving has read every ebook posted at MobileReadKen Irving has read every ebook posted at MobileReadKen Irving has read every ebook posted at MobileReadKen Irving has read every ebook posted at MobileReadKen Irving has read every ebook posted at MobileReadKen Irving has read every ebook posted at MobileRead
 
Posts: 86
Karma: 65586
Join Date: Aug 2010
Location: New York
Device: Nook "1st Edition" Wireless, Nook4PC, NookStudy, Kindle4PC
Amazon can sell (or not sell) what it wants, and in fact if they want to sell everything in the known universe but books about poodles, or decide that they will only sell political books by people who affiliate with a certain party, they can do that. Either choice (no poodles or one party) would be stupid and would lose them business, but they're not obligated to sell absolutely everything someone loads onto their servers. But what they cannot and should not be allowed to do is to sell something and then take it back, as they did with the Orwell book, or as they effectively did here, without either notice to the buyers or the offer of a refund. They obviously made a mistake by accepting books from a genre that is probably offensive to most people, and certainly would make Amazon the center of controversy. So fine, but what they did is not the way to fix it. Censorship? Only in the very narrow sense that they have eliminated access to ebooks already bought, because Amazon itself can neither control nor suppress access to this kind of literature in general. If you Google something like "incest erotica," you'll find that there are plenty of outlets for this stuff, and probably just about any other erotic variation you can think of. Understandably, most of it is free, but there's a business opening here for an epub Larry Flynt (entrepreneurial spirit, strong stomach, elastic morals) who can come up with the bucks to run a DRM server and charge for admission. "O brave new world! That has such people in it!"

Not.
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