Monthly Archives October 2013

Kobo Survey – Initial results

October 22, 2013 Uncategorized

A few days ago I launched this poll: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/W82N6TY covering authors affected by Kobo's actions. It's been live for three days, with answers from many authors covering over 1000 books: an interesting poll with some interesting results. There were a few issues:People believing their books were live when they were not. Many overseas authors did not realise that their books can be live on their author accounts and the US site, but had been removed from the UK site. I received a number of corrective emails when they realised. Likewise authors in other genres assumed because the books were not adult they had not been removed and did not check.Some questions were poorly worded - the details that came out in the comments revealed a lot of extra data.Although I made

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Kobo & WhSmith – Author Survey

October 19, 2013 Uncategorized

Following up from my last post, this ia a quick survey to find out how many of the afected authors actually wrote erotica or adult material. Without going into the rights or wrongs of whether books should be banned, this is more about assessing the collatoral damage of the recent actions taken by WH Smith and Kobo.

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Kobo & WH Smith – Insanity or Incompetance?

October 14, 2013 Uncategorized

It has been very hard to miss the complaints about "adult material" making it into the WH Smith online ebook store recently, or the fact they have taken their site down. The basic issue - adult books showing on a general search for innocuous - is correct and as reported. The causes of this, however, are a little more complicated than the standard press story covers.First, it is necessary to note WH Smith gets its ebook feed from Kobo, which allows a much broader range of such explicit content than many suppliers. Second, WH Smith have removed their entire site, instead of just the ebook store, inconveniencing a lot of customers for little reason.

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