Rupert Goodwins' Diary

Tuesday 1/08/2006

Curious goings-on at Amazon. The company is getting worried that its rate of growth is slowing, so it's been investing in lots of things such as free delivery schemes, a bigger range of products including groceries, and fixing problems caused by erstwhile partners pulling out. This involves spending lots of money for gains that will take a while to come through, so naturally enough the analysts are seeing this as a terrible state of affairs.

So far, so normal. But there's been some collateral damage. Last year, Amazon bought a company called mobipocket, which publishes e-books for PDAs. Fair enough: the company needs an e-book strategy, even if the medium is currently commercially insignificant. But now it seems as if the company is losing all non-Amazon published e-books from its lists. It's also kicking off the saucy stuff, with mobipocket announcing that it would no longer carry "pornography" and, with immediate effect, it was withdrawing all content that it deemed porn.

Which is curious, as e-book porn was the only success story in the medium. To be more accurate, slashfic was the success — and the purveyors and consumers of slashfic are foaming at the mouth at having their one commercial channel cut off.

I won't dwell overly on slashfic. It's quasi-legal porn written by straight women for straight women, all about alpha males having gay sex: the quasi-legal side is that a lot of these alpha males are famous celebrities and thus have disturbingly non-fictional lawyers to help them protect their virtue. This makes it hard (yes, thank you at the back) to sell the stuff through normal channels. Self-publishing is fine, but marketing and commercials are hard. Amazon e-books take care of both: you're in.

No longer. It seems odd that Amazon/mobipocket should choose to complain about the pornographic nature of the content, rather than the intellectual property issues. There's plenty of non-infringing slashfic ("How am I going to get my Viking porn now?" asks one outraged afficionado), and Amazon itself has no problems selling sex toys and the sort of mainstream fiction that qualifies as erotica chiefly because there are no naked people on the front cover. As far as I know, the issue of e-book porn hasn't been raised by even the most rabid right-wing fundamentalist family-obsessed anti-fun lobby. And while slashfic is something of a specialised taste, I've long been of the opinion that it's a vast underexploited market that could rapidly rise to commercial prominence if somebody would just take a stand (that's quite enough of that).

So why cut off the only source of revenue for e-books, just as pornography is becoming more acceptable in the mainstream than ever? Is this another manifestation of the peculiar American puritanism that expresses itself in zillion-dollar fines for a second of TV nipple, or some peculiar kind of corporate homophobia?

Perhaps one of the slashfic ladies wrote up a Bezos/Gates fantasy. That would make as much sense as anything. But no, thanks, I don't need to see the evidence.