The British press is going through another one of its periodic bouts of sanctimonious, self-righteous gittery with the result that W.H. Smith has taken its entire e-book site down. The Daily Mail led the charge with the claim that "disturbingly graffic content" was on sale "next to children's books." The fact that the Daily Mail has its very own softcore sidebar of shame is of course to be overlooked completely in the drive to get the spiritual daughters of Mary Whitehouse all clucking like lobotomised hens. And drive sales, let's not forget that.
At the moment the press only seem to be concentrating on the rape and incest novels, but I suspect that the rest of us will come under attack sooner rather than later. All the more reason to support the writers and publishers of that type of erotica in the hope that when the self-righteous turn on us, we will have a coalition of all the producers to oppose them, not just a few.
Luckily, Amazon has told the self righteous to get stuffed and it is business as usual at that site. Kobo, which supplied the books for the now offline W.H. Smith site is also adopting a policy of business as usual. Smashwords.com is also running normally as are the smaller sites that cater for pure erotica.
It is unlikely that the press will go after Amazon as they are too big a fish to swallow. Instead, the Mail will attack the small publishing houses, such as mine, and seek to bring them under new government censorship laws. We could get a rerun of the video nasties nonsense that led to the censoring of a
plethora of major Hollywood films in the 1980s. Hard though it may be
for younger readers to believe, but The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was
banned in this country for many years.
All the more reason for the producers to stick together and for you, the reading public, to stand with us in opposition to this latest lunacy.
