Just a quick post to mention a recent, short piece on theBookseller.com, “Apple removes erotica from iPad book charts”.
Victoria Gallagher, the author of theBookseller piece, wrote that Apple had been accused of censorship of its iBook bestseller charts:
“Yesterday morning the novella Blonde and Wet, the Complete Story by Carl East was topping the chart, with another title by East, Big Sis, second, and Six Sexy Stories by Ginger Starr, in fifth place. By the afternoon these titles had disappeared and had instead been replaced with the likes of The Perfect Murder by Peter James and The Third Man by Peter Mandelson.”
The story caught my eye because when Sony’s eReader came out, I was amused by the fact that the charts on both Sony’s own online eBook store and also Waterstone’s eBook store (which caters for UK-based owners of the Sony Reader) were dominated by ‘erotica’ novels. It’s obviously a lucrative market, so one has to wonder why Steve Jobs would want to cut his company out of that market – especially considering the fact that ‘urban fantasy’ is still available, and books in that genre are frequently filled with explicit (and cringe-worthily-written) sex scenes.
I put this down at the time to the benefit of downloading a book with a saucy cover over buying it at a store (which I assume comes with a modicum of embarrassment).
There’s something about the way Gallagher wrote the above paragraph that certainly lends itself to innuendo and supposition that dropping the erotica titles benefitted the rankings of such big-name publications as Peter Mandelson’s memoir – although, one must wonder if the book really needed any more publicity or help in sales, given the level of publicity it’s already received…
Anyway, I just thought I’d comment, put my two cents out there.
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