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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Zusammenarbeit Macht Frei

From: Wikipedia

"In The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact With Hitler, Ben Urwand draws on a wealth of previously uncited documents to argue that Hollywood studios, in an effort to protect the German market for their movies, not only acquiesced to Nazi censorship but also actively and enthusiastically cooperated with that regime’s global propaganda effort.

     In the 1930s 'Hollywood is not just collaborating with Nazi Germany,' Mr. Urwand said by telephone from Cambridge, Mass., where he is currently at Harvard’s prestigious Society of Fellows. 'It’s also collaborating with Adolf Hitler, the person and human being.'…
     Mr. Urwand strongly defended the notion of 'collaboration,' noting that the word (and its German equivalent, Zusammenarbeit) occurs repeatedly in documents on both sides.
     And he bristled at the suggestion that Hollywood had a better record against Nazism than other major industries, to say nothing of the State Department, which repeatedly blocked efforts to expand visas for Jewish refugees.
     'The State Department’s record is atrocious,' he said. 'But the State Department did not finance the production of Nazi armaments. It did not distribute pro-Nazi newsreels in Germany. It did not meet with Nazi officials and do secret deals.'
     'Collaboration,' he added, 'is what the studios were doing, and how they describe it.'”
— Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times
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Mr. Urwand's book will be released in October; preorder it here...

Big Apple

From: Folded Sky

"The burgeoning trend of censorship in the cyber sphere has claimed another victim.
     Apple Inc., the digital-retailing leviathan, is refusing to market the Hippie 1 and 2 e-books and iPad apps by bestselling Danish author Peter Ovig Knudsen.
     The two-part retrospective of Denmark’s lively hippie culture in the late 1960s and early 1970s was rejected by Apple’s iBookstore sales platform last month because – with photographs of naked men and women – it violated the company’s policy guidelines, which stipulate no sexually explicit photos. [...]
     There are two principal issues here. The first is apparent hypocrisy. Apple deems a dozen, 40-year-old, black-and-white photographs of Danes frolicking au naturel morally offensive, but sells Dani Olivier’s Anthology of Nude Photography and Nude Inspiration in a Painter’s Studio by Kristofer Paetau and Ondrej Brody – both volumes filled with pictures of naked bodies. It also continues to sell apps for Playboy and Sports Illustrated, which feature partially naked women.
     The second is freedom of expression: Who appointed Apple the globe’s moral arbiter?"
— Michael Posner, The Globe and Mail
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Caveat Lector

"[G.P.] Taylor [bestselling children's author of the Vampyre Labyrinth series] believes it is necessary to establish an age-ranging system for children's literature – despite the fact that the idea was mooted by children's publishers four years ago to widespread protests by authors. 'We've got Dickens with Oliver Twist who was abandoned by his parents and went off on a journey. We've got the Famous Five whose parents were quite neglectful and who went off on a journey. There was always safety. They never went as far as they did today. I think the way forward is a certification system for books, the same way we have in films,' said Taylor. 'For children, we've got to be really careful. [And] we've got to have a guide for parents.' [...]
     His views were roundly rebutted on BBC Breakfast by the writer Patrick Ness, who earlier this summer won the Carnegie medal for the second year running for his novel A Monster Calls, about a boy whose mother has cancer and who is visited by a monster.

     Ness welcomed the darkness in the literature written for teenagers today, and rejected the idea of age-ranging children's books. 'All you have to really do is read what teenagers write themselves, and I've judged competitions for teenagers writing and it's darkness beyond anything I would come up with,' said Ness. 'Teenagers look at this darkness all the time, and I always think if you're not addressing it in your fiction then you're abandoning them to face it themselves.'"
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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Get books by G.P. Taylor and Patrick Ness here...

“Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?”— Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

From: Modern Mechanix

"But early this year, Grove Press, a venturesome publishing house, felt that the time had come to challenge the taboo and they brought out the book unexpurgated, just as Lawrence wrote it. Literary critics all over the country cheered. Some said it was a masterpiece. Some said it wasn’t all that great, but still it was a good book and a serious one that deserved to be read. Not one important critic felt that the book should continue to be suppressed.
     A bookclub for eggheads, the Reader’s Subscription, thought enough of the book to make it a selection and started to mail it out to members.
     Wham! The Post Office stepped in.
     The fellows who always ring twice refused to ring at all for Lady Chatterley. The P.O. said the book was obscene and couldn’t be mailed.
     This punch not only caught the Reader’s Subscription in the solar plexus (they do their business by mail) but it was also a gasser for the Grove Press, which couldn’t mail the copies out to bookstores.
     So the two companies demanded a hearing. The Post Office gave them one before Judicial Officer Charles D. Ablard. The companies brought in two of the most eminent literary critics in America, Malcolm Cowley and Alfred Kazin, to testify that the book was not obscene, but was a work of art by a serious artist.
     Ablard listened, but passed the transcript and the final decision on to Postmaster General Summerfield. And Summerfield decided that Lady Chattelley’s Lover was filthy."
— Tim Wilkins, "Art Or Filth? – The Prose And Cons Of Lady Chatterley" (Nov, 1959) Mechanix Illustrated via Modern Mechanix
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"In its twice-yearly Transparency Report, the world's largest web search engine [Google] said the requests were aimed at having some 12,000 items overall removed, about a quarter more than during the first half of last year.
     'Unfortunately, what we've seen over the past couple years has been troubling, and today is no different,' Dorothy Chou, the search engine's senior policy analyst, said in a blogpost. 'We hoped this was an aberration. But now we know it's not.'
      Many of those requests targeted political speech, keeping up a trend Google said it has noticed since it started releasing its Transparency Report in 2010.
     'It's alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect — Western democracies not typically associated with censorship,' said Chou.
     [...] in Thailand videos featuring the monarch with a seat over his head have been removed for insulting the monarchy. The country has some of the world's toughest 'lese- majeste' laws.
     In Canada, Google was asked by officials to get rid of a YouTube video showing a citizen urinating on his passport and flushing it down the toilet. But in that instance the company refused.
     Google and many other online providers maintain that they cannot lawfully remove any content for which they are merely the host and not the producer, a principle enshrined in EU law on eCommerce since 2000."
— Reuters (via Huffington Post)
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