Kobo drops all independent authors

by theworm · Published October 25, 2013 · Updated July 17, 2014

Well, I only found out to day that Kobo have removed Powerless from their ebook store. And it’s not just me affected.

You may have heard about the tremendous WH Smith overreaction to a failure of their own website which caused it to list erotica alongside children’s books when searching for certain words.

“Wait, Powerless is erotica?” and my sales shoot up! Nope, not erotica. We’re just getting to that bit.

This happened partly because a lot of independent authors are published on Kobo, WH Smiths ebook partner, and the Smith’s website pulled content from their catalogue. Because the WH Smith website has no ‘adult content’ filter for searches, if you did a search for ‘Daddy’ you got a simple list of ALL titles which contained that word – kids books and stories featuring incest and rape together.
So WH Smith did the most sensible thing and fixed their website search function… hang on, no, they took their entire ebook website offline instead. Yep, that should do it.

Shortly after it seems that Kobo thought deeply about this issue and made sure adult book categories were separate from the rest for title searches and allowed independent authors to continue to sell their books through them, avoiding any disruption and damage to their livelihoods.

Oops, no, wrong again! They decided to not just remove all such books, they removed ALL books from ALL independent authors ‘just in case’. Including mine. A book about superheroes.

The funny thing is, both WH Smith and Kobo say that these authors have broken their rules. From the Independent article linked above:

“…we are disgusted by these particular titles, find this unacceptable and we in no way whatsoever condone them.”
WH Smith said the website will become live again once all self-published ebooks have been removed and “we are totally sure that there are no offending titles available”.

A spokesperson for Kobo said: “This unfortunate situation is the result of a select group of publishers and authors violating the self-publishing policies of our platform. These titles will be removed and we will address the individuals in question directly. Our goal is not to negatively impact the freedom of expression and the work of the amazing self-published community that has been created at Kobo.com.”

Ignore for a moment the ‘what about the children’ overreaction to some negative press that could have been fixed by a website update and a properly thought out press release saying that all books, whatever their content, are equally valid creative works, oh and please use the new adult content filter guys, thanks.
Ignore for a moment that WH Smith used to, and may still do (haven’t been in their book department for a long time) have a section of shelves devoted to ‘Tragic life stories’ (read: Child Sexual Abuse) that was full of harrowing books with off-white covers, greyscale pictures of sad little girl’s faces all with titles that could be distilled down to: “Oh god, daddy don’t hurt me!”
Ignore for a moment that one of the fastest selling series books of the last few years is a trilogy of S&M erotica fiction sold by both stores.
Even ignoring those, this is a huge double-standard.

Take a look at the Kobo quote: authors have violated the self-publishing policies of the platform? So no erotica is allowed on Kobo? That would be fair enough except erotica seems to be allowed as long as it’s a traditionally published book (‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ and its sequels are still available on their store for example), just not from a self-published author. Same with incest, rape and other controversial yet valid topics of fiction: not allowed if you wrote and published the book yourself. I see how that works.

Now I’m usually very laid back about life and things that happen in it, but the more I think about this, the more upset I become. Either traditionally published books should have the same set of more restrictive rules applied to them as self-pub books i.e. no stories featuring erotica or rape are allowed on Kobo from ANY source, or they just add a damn adult content filter to their websites.

At the moment Kobo say they are going through all the books they have removed to check for content that they don’t approve of (wouldn’t like to be the intern reading through all those thousands of books).
[SPOILERS FOR POWERLESS]
As I said above, my book is a superhero novel, but it does feature a gang rape scene. Now I was extremely careful in writing it so that the full horror of witnessing and being unable to be of any help in such a situation was put across to anyone reading. But thanks to Kobo I have no idea if my book violates their policies.
[/END SPOILERS]
Is there a computer program searching through all text and binning any books that happen to contain some keywords regardless of context or literary merit? Or is there the aforementioned poor intern, reading every book that has been removed and arbitrarily deciding which books can be sold based on their personal opinion on what is suitable for their customers?

Truth is, we don’t know. So I have decided to help Kobo out and save them the extra work of going through all 125,000 words of Powerless by removing my book and all future titles from their catalogue. Glad to be of help guys.

Tl:Dr “Our goal is not to negatively impact the freedom of expression and the work of the amazing self-published community that has been created at Kobo.com” – too late.