Doing Something About #Pornocalypse: An Uncensored Amazon Search Engine
This is awesome! Franklin Veaux writes:
A couple of years ago, I discovered that the number of books I was selling suddenly fell off a cliff. I did some research and found that the same thing was happening to a lot of erotica writers, especially self-published writers. Amazon’s Search function on their Web site was filtering out a lot of erotica, particularly erotica with themes of non-traditional relationships like BDSM.
However, I discovered something interesting a few months back: The Amazon search API, a set of programmer’s tools that allows Web programmers to search Amazon’s book titles, doesn’t filter search results. You can log on to Amazon and do a search for a particular book and see no results, but if you write a Web site that uses Amazon’s API and do a search, ta-da, there it is!
I’m sure you can see where this is going.
On and off for the past few months, I have been working on building a new Web site, called Red Lit Search. This site has a database of erotic books in Amazon’s catalog–so far only about eighteen hundred or so, but the list is growing — and also allows you to do uncensored searches of Amazon.
Way to go Franklin!
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=16376
The thing is, I have a Kindle, and I’ve found it damn easy to find Huge amounts of erotic digital content (there’s a lot of military-themed stuff, not that surprising, and a lot of MFM-relationship stuff, which I found a bit surprising considering how common [currently] I hear it said that women don’t like a man who’s been with another man).
Perhaps it’s more about how much of a margin Amazon is making? Or is it possible that they make an exception for digital content?
Justin, have you followed the Amazon #pornocalypse links over the years? It’s not that Amazon bans very much of anything — they have probably the deepest library of commercial written erotica in the world. But they have gone through several waves of making it harder to find (or even impossible, in the case of some titles and categories) via their search. Just because you can still find lots doesn’t mean that they aren’t hiding even more…
I’ve read a lot of the posts about this quite concerning subject, the question is why Amazon is allowing some content and not others. Are they getting better margins on works created via certain methods, and so not allowing others in? Do they only allow certain authors/editors in, perhaps because they have more control over what they’re producing?
I certainly take your points (and those of many others talking about the same topic) about how hard it has become for erotic content to be found unless you already know which sites/platforms/channels/uploaders have it. My point is that Some is getting onto Amazon, and I’m wondering what the distinction is, who is making those decisions, and why. Which is probably the same question that is keeping a Lot of erotic content authors up at night.
It may come down to money/margins, this article (https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/how-to-make-money-writing-kindle-erotica?utm_source=mbfb) seems to imply that Amazon-acceptable erotica creation is quite a sweatshop environment, perhaps not offering the kinds of returns that established authors consider worth their time. Just like many studios are seeing margins disappear (to the point of many of them deciding to shut up shop) with the rise of the RedTube/et al monopoly on video content, perhaps Amazon’s essential monopoly on providing digital erotica texts is squeezing those content creators too much as well.
This is a classic problem in a mature market, when a monopoly or oligopoly form, and the monopoly company or the oligopoly company’s collusion starts to affect the supply chain as a whole, driving down supplier margins, sometimes unhealthily so. It’s happening right now in Australia with milk, the two largest supermarket chains somehow magically both insist on paying less per litre for milk from their suppliers very shortly after each other. But no one can (or is motivated enough to) prove collusion. Or if it does happen, they get fined a bit, they apologise, and the fine is nothing compared to the extra profits they’ve made. And most people are too tired/overwhelmed to care enough to change their behaviour for a long enough time to make those companies pay at the till to dissuade them from doing it again.
I imagine that Google/Tumblr/Amazon are chasing bigger bucks when they marginalise the edgier markets that helped them get started, you’ve got to love the good old USA Type A Corporate structure where profit is the only thing that the board is allowed to focus on, and you can get sued if you don’t continually focus on that. Also the financial media is Always going on about ‘profit growth’, ignoring the reality that we live in a finite environment, at some point you can Only grow by taking market share from others, there are no new customers left.
I think the problems that so many are experiencing are the side effects of classic market forces, which have long been shown to have painful outcomes for those without the power to control prices. If there’s only one middleman for erotica, they’re the ones who are setting the prices. Unless we change the game board, the same thing is going to happen over and over again. I’m not sure how long a privately-financed platform would last, most companies need funding levels which are all too often tied to the same backers pushing Google/Tumblr/Amazan/etc into the behaviours we’re seeing currently.
Rather than trying to play the game better (because the majors just have so much clout), how do we break the board?