
Below I present a few refinements to our
existing guidelines. Nothing big there, but if you have the time, please quickly skim through them.
Book Uploads according to Life+70 Rule
Two weeks ago we successfully
moved our servers to a new host. We said goodbye to Montreal, Canada and welcome to New Jersey, USA. Because of differing copyright laws, eBooks uploaded to this site must now be in the "life+70" public domain or licensed under a compatible Creative Commons license. This means that the author (or translator) of the book must have died at least 70 years before the start of the current year.
Feel free to use the report button if you have questions about a book's copyright status.
MobileRead Amazon Referral Tag
I want to be upfront. We're going to experiment by adding an official MobileRead tag to Amazon links posted here. So,
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1476746583/
becomes
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1476746583/?tag=mr060-20
For example, every time someone asks for some information on something, and you include a link to Amazon in your response, that link gets updated to include our tag. The commission we'd receive when a user makes a purchase through this link would help contribute towards the running costs of the site. The only difference is that Amazon will know that you came from MobileRead; no other information is shared and prices are the same.
As always, I appreciate your feedback and I want to make sure it is cool with most people.
Our general guideline remains. It is generally not allowed to deliberately post links containing commission, referral or affiliate tags in the forums (with very few exceptions, such as in clearly marked signatures, subject to moderator approval).
Keeping things family- and work-friendly
TL;DR: It is not permitted to post sexually explicit or erotic content.
We pride ourselves on being a family- and work-friendly community. Children visit this forum and, for better or worse, our conduct sets an example that can either foster or hinder a life-long interest in reading books. We also want parents to feel confident that this community is safe for their children to visit.
It goes without saying that flaming, cursing and trolling are not acceptable.
What's more difficult to define is where we draw the line with explicit content. It's been our policy for as long as I remember that users must not publish images or video that contain adult content, sexually oriented material, or might otherwise be considered offensive. Also sexual connotations or references have no place in this community. Yet, as of late we've noticed a trend among a handful of authors presenting literary works that would clearly fall under the rule of not being family-friendly. By clearly I mean the kind of content that you wouldn't want a child to see or that you might be embarrassed to view at work in front of colleagues. This could be a cover image, a book summary, or even endorsing links to said book. We will not accept this type of content any longer and reserve the right to remove posts that we deem inappropriate (yup, it's a judgment call).
Examples of related content not permitted include, but are not limited to, nudity, pornography, extreme profanity, erotica, sexually suggestive or explicit text.
Trust me this is not an expression of conservative views.

Rather, it's about what we consider inappropriate when welcoming a broad audience including children from all over the world. Overall, I'm just repeating what I guess everyone already knows and it shouldn't affect much of our community.
Discussions related to DRM
A very long time ago eBooks were only for geeks (remember the Sony LIBRIe?

) Back then, discussions related to DRM were mostly in the interest of those who liked to tinker with technologies (and crack existing protections) and those who didn't want to pay for their content (i.e. warez it). Times have changed, and nowadays the topic of DRM is much more related to discussing the various eBook formats and vendor lock-ins. In this context, we have slightly updated our rules.
While DRM removal may be discussed in the abstract, the following are not allowed at MobileRead:
- discussing DRM removal to pirate content;
- providing detailed how-to instructions;
- uploading of DRM-removal tools;
- direct download links to DRM-removal tools.
Nothing really new here, except, now it's OK to name the relevant tools and also to provide links to
legitimate sites that may discuss certain aspects of this topic in more detail than we would permit. For example, a link to
this Ars Technica article is now OK.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask or contact me directly.
Cheers!