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Originally Posted by crich70
Don't all publisher's have a set of guidelines on what they will and won't publish though? If I write a Murder Mystery and submit it to a publisher that only publishes Science Fiction that publisher will refuse to accept my manuscript for publication. And in the case of Erotic fiction there are sub-genre's and some publishers will publish one sub-genre of Erotic fiction and not another. I think it's one thing for a company like Paypal to make a decision for a publisher as to what they will and won't allow said publisher to publish and for the publisher themselves to make that decision.
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I don't think it matters at all whether its the publisher doing the censoring or the transaction merchant in this case. It's one thing for a publisher to screen their applications based on literary merit, but quite another to do so based on a moral code.
It would certainly be an outrage if the transaction merchant started functioning as a second gatekeeper as far as literary merit is concerned.
However, it's obvious that Smashwords bases their censoring of certain genres based on a moral code, not on literary merit. One cannot state that this is purely the realm of the publisher. There's no distinction between a publisher doing it, and the transaction merchant doing it. One can either be comfortable with them both doing it, or opposed to them both doing it.