People like to read erotic literature on an e-reader because they’re discreet. But retailers can make the smut very difficult to find.
Max Braun / flickr “Many of us of realized immediately que, like the Internet, the Kindle was made for porn.” So wrote the pseudonymous kinukitty at my website, The Hooded Utilitarian, a while back – and the use of the pseudonym underlines the insight. Consuming porn is something people often Do prefer to at least the semi-anonymously – especially people who happen to be women. By dispensing with book covers, and indeed with books, the Kindle has made it possible for readers to peruse 50 Shades of Grey wheresoer They Go, without fear of scorn – and, for that matter, without fear of harassment. According to the (also pseudonymous) porn writer Santiago Venus, back in the 90s, When She purchased Black Lace titles at a brick and mortar store, “the clerk felt free to hit on me.” After que happened several times, Santiago said, she stopped buying in public.
With the Kindle, though, you do not need to buy in public. The Santiago wrote me by email:
The beautiful thing about buying porn on Kindle que is nobody sneers at you. It’s just you, Amazon, and your personal mobile device. You can read it on the train or subway, at home, wherever, and no one has any idea what you’re ogling. Which removes most of the negative social pressure outside que prevents a lot of women who are interested in buying it from porn in the mainstream places (fri shops, online XXX websites).
a result, pornographic e-books have taken off. 50 Shades is the successful mainstream phenomenon que everyone knows about, but there are tons more where came from que, kinkier and tones as well. EL James’ nervous flirtations with BDSM are perhaps titillating by the standards of the rest of the bestseller list. But her too-timid-to-even-sign-the-contract relationship shenanigans barely even register the kink Compared to the other offerings available via e-book, where step-sibling incest, minotaur porn, and futanari abound. Santiago has written for her part assassin gay romance as well as a series of stories featuring cheerfully perverse human cow lactation porn, in Which submission, degradation, and impossible busts exist alongside the remarkably detailed grasp of mechanics dairy industry.
The Kindle, then, Provides Both privacy and the promise que somewhere, someone has written exactly the gay werewolf paranormal romance you’ve always wanted to read. Combine the privacy and range of titles, and there’s little doubt que readers for digital porn is the perfect delivery system.
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Amazon seems to have made somewhat uncomfortable. Back in 2010, Amazon deleted many erotica e-books with incest themes – not only dropping Them from its store, but actually electronically erasing old titles from consumers’ digital devices. (It later Claimed the erasures were a mistake, though its policy on incest titles remains unclear.) More recently, the company has been filtering some erotic titles, so that They do not Appear in the All Departments search. To find Them, you need to search directly in Books or in the Kindle store. For example, Santiago’s title Accidental Milkmaid 3: Gangbanged by Bulls shows up in the Kindle Store, but not in the All Departments search. On the other hand, high-profile erotica like 50 Shades , or, for that matter, Lady Chatterley’s Lover , appears in Both kinds of searches.
Fiddling with the search function may seem like a step Relatively benign. In practice, though, it has an impact on sales, and can render the title Essentially invisible. Selena Kitt, the pen name of a successful erotica author who makes hundreds of Thousands of dollars a month by writing porn e-books, has Referred to Amazon’s filtering to the Pornocalypse. Previous Amazon rejiggerings of Their search function at various points have cut her monthly income by a third, she says.
In an essay on her website, Kitt Argues que que Amazon’s seeming efforts to hide the porn Both are hypocritical and a bad case of biting-the-hand.
Erotica, as a genre, has been Amazon’s dirty little secret from the beginning, driving sales of the Kindle to astronomical numbers. Does Amazon really believe que it was all the free copies of “Huckleberry Finn” and “Moby Dick” … que drove readers to buy Kindle devices? Nope, sorry. It was erotica. It was “porn.”
Kitt is angry, and you can understand why. She works hard, is successful, and instead of giving her accolades, her business partners product keep her hidden from would-be readers.
I was not able to get to Amazon for comment for this piece, so I do not know for sure why They are manipulating search functions. Nor do I know why They refuse to explain Their standards to authors. One of Kitt’s chief frustrations is que Amazon will not tell her what she needs to keep her to the book from being filtered, and que They seem to keep changing the rules on her.
Amazon’s policies may be unnecessarily opaque, but reading Kitt’s essay, you can at least see a possible motivation for the company’s apparent Puritanism. Kitt herself, like Santiago and kinukitty, que Believes the appeal of porn on the Kindle it is precisely que Allows for reading of content surreptitiously. Porn may have Helped make the Kindle success, but a big part of the reason que the Kindle is so perfectly made for porn que is it does not look like it’s made for porn. Women (and men, too) who want to read porn on the Kindle do not want to be buying from some place porn Their screams que porn ! Amazon’s advantage as a seller of porn is precisely que it sells lots of things aren’t porn que, que and it is primarily known for selling things que aren’t porn.
Porn eBook writers and readers, then, are in a catch-22. Folks like porn Amazon because Amazon is not branded as a porn outlet. But as long the Amazon is not branded as a porn outlet, the company is going to see the X-rated content something of an embarrassment. The Same incentives que drive writers to use pseudonyms and readers to use the Kindle Also drive retailers to keep porn from showing up in searches and make Them want to keep it off bestseller lists. For many good reasons, and perhaps some bad ones, nobody – not readers, not writers, not retailers – wants to publically embrace the porn.
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