Friday, February 17, 2012

Friday Trash: Censorship, Anyone?

Got this in my inbox today.
At first thought it must be a joke. But, no, it is all too real. I still have some investigating to do, to see what this is all about...but really? What's next, book burning parties? It's not like the story I'm thinking of portrays any of the to be mentioned below "offensive" things as titillating. It's a well written book with a scene where a character gets raped. And how his brother and mates are affected by that incident, especially the brother (twin) who was victimized by the same psycho. The overall message is one of hope and is chock full of positive messages.

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Msg I received.
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Hi everyone.
I mostly lurk these days, but I ran into an email in one of my other groups that surprised me greatly. This popped up on Gay Writers Readers, and on this note, my thanks to Victor Banis who mentioned it.

"We were informed by PayPal, without notice, and by our credit card processing company, that we are required to remove all titles at BookStrand.comwith content containing incest, pseudo incest, rape, and bestiality, effective immediately.

"We request that you immediately log into your account and unpublish all titles that contain the restricted content. If you have uploaded titles containing restricted content and do not unpublish these titles as we are requesting, we will deactivate your entire publisher account, which will remove all your titles from sale."

It seems that Paypal has requested all books with questionable content be removed from certain distributors. In this case, the distributor in question was Bookstrand. I checked to see and indeed, the one book that had incest was removed from the Bookstrand website. Some others with incest content were also removed. 
What is the Silver policy to deal with this? Is there anything that can be done? I'm honestly not sure how this is possible. I'm quite confused and concerned.
Thanks in advance for any info.

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Crazy part is how quick Bookstrand jumped to obey.
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2 comments:

  1. Okay. Update. More info just in.

    Seems that there are more than a few titles that numerous "reputable" distributors won't carry. Because they mention rape and such. One EIC calls it being muzzled.

    Hmm. Kinda makes me all warm and fuzzy. Not.

    ReplyDelete
  2. There is more information available at J.S. Wayne's blog: http://jswayne.wordpress.com/2012/02/16/censorship-and-paypal-unconstitutional-and-wrong/

    ReplyDelete

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