The offensive against the offensive: self-published erotica comes under fire

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Amazon have removed from their catalogue several self-published ebooks that depict violent acts of rape and incest, and today Kobo Writing Life authors will have received an email from KWL director Mark Lefebvre indicating that Kobo are following suit. The current offensive is the result of an article on the British technology website The Kernel that found for sale on Amazon pornographic titles such as Naughty Daughter Abducted And Pounded By Daddy’s Cock: Anal Sex And BDSM With My Step Father (taboo daddy daughter erotica) by Shannon Leigh. It cited Read More …

How to read ePubs on your Kindle Fire — even DRMed ones!

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Today I learned a wonderful trick: a way to put onto a Kindle Fire an ePub ereader that will read PDFs and ePubs — even Adobe DRMed ebooks — purchased from major retailers such as Kobo, Sony, and B&N, and the myriad of smaller ebook retailers worldwide. Apple ebooks, which use a different DRM, are not transferrable. The principle is this: the Kindle Fire works on top of the Android system, and with a simple click in your settings you can tell the Fire to read Android apps purchased outside Read More …

The hypocrisy of piracy

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Those who promote or facilitate the “sharing” of copyrighted content like to perpetuate an image of themselves as freedom-fighting renegades out “to stick it to the man” — the adage itself pirated from the sixties — “the man” representing those big bad corporations that make a profit off the backs of us artists and consumers alike. It’s an easy sell when you’re selling free, with the masses happy to swallow bullshit disguised as honey and overlook the obvious hypocrisy of the typical pirate site: corporate advertising. Go to any torrent Read More …

Writers under attack again

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[UPDATE: the video originally posted and referenced here has been removed from YouTube.] The above video was posted on YouTube in the hope of stopping an educational exemption in the proposed new copyright bill. Whether or not the exemption is fair-dealing or the video fear-mongering (as some have suggested) isn’t, to me, the real issue; to me, this proposed exemption is just one more example of the myriad ways in which people seem to think that writers should work for free. Consider Ariana Huffington’s insistence that her contributors are happy Read More …