that drove readers to buy Kindle devices? Nope, sorry.
Does Amazon really believe that it was all the free copies of "Huckleberry Finn" and "Moby Dick". In an essay on her website, Kitt argues that that Amazon's seeming efforts to hide the porn are both hypocritical and a bad case of biting-the-hand.Įrotica, as a genre, has been Amazon's dirty little secret from the beginning, driving sales of the Kindle to astronomical numbers. Previous Amazon rejiggerings of their search function have at various points cut her monthly income by a third, she says. 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 as the Pornocalypse. In practice, though, it has an impact on sales, and can render a title essentially invisible.
On the other hand, high-profile erotica like 50 Shades, or, for that matter, Lady Chatterley's Lover, appears in both kinds of searches.įiddling with the search function may seem like a relatively benign step.
For example, Santiago's title Accidental Milkmaid 3: Gangbanged by Bulls shows up in the Kindle Store, but not in the All Departments search. To find them, you need to search directly in Books or in the Kindle store. (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 don't appear in the All Departments search. 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. Which seems to have made Amazon somewhat uncomfortable. Combine the privacy and range of titles, and there's little doubt that for readers digital is the perfect porn delivery system.Īmerica's Deep Rift on Gender Issues Olga Khazan The Kindle, then, provides both privacy and the promise that somewhere, someone has written exactly the gay werewolf paranormal romance you've always wanted to read.
Santiago for her part has written gay assassin romance as well as a series of cheerfully perverse stories featuring human cow lactation porn, in which submission, degradation, and impossible busts exist alongside a remarkably detailed grasp of dairy industry mechanics. But her too-timid-to-even-sign-the-contract relationship shenanigans barely even register as kink compared to the other offerings available via e-book, where step-sibling incest, minotaur porn, and futanari abound. James' nervous flirtations with BDSM are perhaps titillating by the standards of the rest of the best-seller list. 50 Shades is the successful mainstream phenomenon that everyone knows about, but there are tons more where that came from, and tons kinkier as well. Which removes most of the outside negative social pressure that prevents a lot of women who are interested in porn from buying it in the mainstream places (sex shops, online XXX websites).Īs a result, pornographic e-books have taken off. You can read it on the train or subway, at home, wherever, and no one has any idea what you're ogling.
It's just you, Amazon, and your personal mobile device. The beautiful thing about buying porn on Kindle is that nobody sneers at you.