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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"... a world that never stops lustering"

MacBook Air "Suprem Fire" Edition: $360,648.00
(from: Elite Choice)

For you all you blocked writers out there, desperate for something to break the logjam, here's a setting for you: made to order, and full of tangential impressions of the creatures who inhabit it.

"For some, the relentless tyranny of luxury rolls on from business class lounge to hotel lobby via restaurant interior and beachside condo. A continuous experience of glistening surfaces, with the spaces in between plugged with walnut-dashed limos.
     These are the weird scenes inside the goldmine of a world that never stops lustering, glistening and shimmering. A world made up of a continuous interior space polished entirely smooth. Each hermetic bubble annexed to another equally high spec bubble. Exterior-less, with no threshold to the un-luxe world the rest of us live in.
     This is the world described in the Robb Report, the self proclaimed 'global luxury resource,' which has just released what it calls its 2013 Luxury Portfolio….
     If we are to believe that a Robb Report world actually exists, it might like to read an edit of American Psycho containing extended descriptions of embossed Silian Rail on business cards. Or Fifty Shades of Grey minus the sex, with page after page in which Anastasia goes wild over the technical specifications of Christian's latest gift…"
— Sam Jacob, dezeen magazine
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Writing's on the Wall

From: Calendars.com

"This is a story about the end of the gatekeeper. About the movement spreading throughout media, from which book publishing is hardly exempt, as readers of Harry Potter, Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey have made all too clear.
     It’s about the reading public – the great unwashed, the hoi polloi – no longer letting tastemakers decide what’s worth reading. It’s about the masses seizing the means of publication.
     Publishing is an injured beast, but it was mortally wounded before Amazon attacked. And the injuries themselves are partly self-inflicted.
     The proof? The vast majority of top-heavy legacy publishers’ books – agented, edited, sales-managed, otherwise massaged, and only then published – tank, sinking with nary a trace. Conversely, some books, refused by dozens of publishers, go on to achieve rock stardom when some kindly soul finally deigns to bring them to market.
     Which means only one thing: Despite their vast education, experience and good taste, publishers have only about a quarter of a clue what the public really wants. For publishers, it’s 'the end of the world as they know it.'"
— Beverly Akerman, The Globe and Mail
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