they want it both ways...

"[...] Amazon and others are 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater' by removing too much of the self-published erotic content and complains that Amazon in particular is not giving authors sufficient explanation as to why their ebooks are being taken down. Another post at International Business Times reports on how readers of such content are up in arms, too, signing a petition to have content reinstated at their favourite ebook retailers. (Kobo seems to be at the centre of this scandal and has recently released a letter explaining its position and what it’s doing about it.)

     Each of these retailers have policies on what kind of content authors can publish and sell with them. [...] Barnes & Noble says in its content guidelines that it may remove any book that 'graphically portrays sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual arousal.'
     Amazon’s policy is similar: 'We don’t accept pornography or offensive depictions of graphic sexual acts. What we deem offensive is probably about what you would expect.'
     That would mean Fifty Shades of Grey, last year’s mega-best-seller (and the fastest selling book of all time), could be removed, which begs the question, who gets to decide what is and is not sold in bookstores?"
— Jeremy Greenfield, Forbes
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Independent Bookstores: as American as French Fries

James Joyce in the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, Paris, 1938
(from: Gisele Freund)

"Everywhere in the world may look more and more like everywhere else, but there are still a few proudly Gallic institutions that you can count on spotting in any city or town in France: cafés that thrive in spite of Starbucks, bakeries with their total indifference to things gluten-free, tabacs that keep hanging on as smokers turn to e-cigarettes.

     Most pleasing of all, in this age of Amazon, are the independent bookstores—around two thousand five hundred of them, all told. Paris alone has nearly seven hundred, one for every three thousand citizens, though the ratio of bookstores to readers often feels closer to one to one. If you can’t find the Colette novel you’re looking for on Rue de Reuilly, you just go two blocks over to the Rue de Charonne, or to Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where bookstores share the street with Algerian tea shops and furniture makers that predate the Revolution.
     This isn’t a university neighborhood with an intellectual pedigree. It’s just the way things are there—pretty different from here. In a recent study of the American cities with the most bookstores, and the most per capita, New York didn’t make the top ten in either category. To a New Yorker who spent her formative years witnessing the routing of independent bookstores by Barnes & Noble, and then the gutting of Barnes & Noble by Amazon, the situation in Paris is luxurious beyond belief."
—Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker
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