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avantman42 it IS obscene content that is the issue, apologies I didn't even notice that comment at the end of BearMountainBooks post about "how to commit crimes", it was the bit pdurrant has quoted that I was meaning. Also fair enough pdurrant, there is no mention of young children as such.
I think there are probably two issues.
Firstly, some of the books shouldn't have been allowed on sale at all, as they are extremely offensive - as mentioned in original BBC news article linked to in the second post, "books depicting rape, incest and bestiality". Not necessarily that they are illegal, but as HarryT says they violate the terms of use of self-publishing on sites like Amazon & Kobo.
Some might be within certain guidelines, I don't know, say erotic but not featuring explicit depictions of rape, and they will sell them but they are not being clearly tagged as explicit content and are coming up in standard searches. This is the bit that is legally worrying for them, as they can be held legally accountable for allowing them to be sold without proper age verification.
This is probably why Kobo & WH Smith seem to have over-reacted, pulling a whole host of self-published books that have nothing to do with the issue, or shutting their website down altogether until they can get rid of the problem.
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