Kobo update

[lovecraft68]

Just an update for any who are interested in the backlash of last months Porn witch hunt.

Kobo went to the extreme by eliminating all self published books no matter what the genre. That led to not only some serious backlash, but I was positive some serious lags in their sales.

Apparently they felt both effects as I recently saw a bunch of sales through smashwords. I was not expecting to see anything from them at this point and started asking around.

It seems Kobo has already re published all non erotic indy titles and are now going to send rejection notices(the way amazon did) to the publishers and give the authors a chance to make necessary changes on certain material-mostly PI as this whole disaster was started with "mommy" "daddy" titles and poor children finding them(due to the irresponsible site selling them, not the authors mind you) but also some things that were rape for titillation, suggestive of underage or Beastie

So they are already reinstating erotica that does not pertain to any of that and if you're clever enough to have "cracked the code" on PI (or even real incest material) you will get that re published as well.

So it looks like in the end Kobo learned that it may make you look "Moral" to try to take a moral stance, in the end money talks and they saw they were going to lose a lot of it.

 

[R. Richard]

Usually the problems come from credit card processing and/or PayPal.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

The "Moral" Majority is constantly after those "they" find immoral, the only problem is, is half of them are the ones that buy our stuff and use Paypal as it can be semi-anonymous.

 

[lovecraft68]

Usually the problems come from credit card processing and/or PayPal.

Usually, but Kobo's knee jerk reaction was made in response to Amazon's reaction of banning all those horrible books and making it seem everyone's fault but their own for not screening the books and not using any form of adult filter.

Kobo did the same, no filter, no attempt at an adult section just everything in plain site then when caught took it out on the authors.

So this had nothing to do with CC and Paypal. But if you recall Paypal tried to do this early last year and blame the CC companies who in turn said they had no idea what PP was talking about and Payapl was forced to back off and shut up.

Kobo was just starting to get a good solid foot in the e-market. Amazon has been losing ground and Kobo is a big part of that.

When amazon wigged out Kobo could have stood their ground and reaped the benefits by selling what their competitor wouldn't.

In stead they took it a step further and banned everything. That was a big shot in the foot because they lost a lot of money when they did and took a bigger hit than amazon on the "censorship" front.

Apparently a really big hit because this 360 happened in barely a month after their banning all indy material