Pornocalypse Comes To Barnes & Noble
From the non-paywalled part of a paywalled article on a publishing news website, we learn that Barnes & Noble is making most small/indy publishers (but perhaps not the majors) remove dirty books from its catalog:
B&N to Limit Erotica And Summary Titles On Their Site
Barnes & Noble is eliminating certain books from their online catalog. Some digital book distributors have been tasked with removing all of their erotica ISBNs from feeding onto the site, as well as public domain works and “summary” titles that bill themselves as guides to other popular books. Additionally, B&N is updating the search function on their site so that customers “can decide to see clearly explicit content or not.” Senior director of book strategy & customer experience Shannon DeVito told PL that this is a quality-control move that will not affect major publishers.
If anybody who is cleverer than me with paywall-defeating tools (but I’m pretty clever, and I failed) can provide a working link to the full article, that would be sweet.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=33095
Wait, I thought that erotic novels were a HUGE money maker for Amazon et al.???
Pornocalypse events almost always seem counterintuitive to profit-maximizing, at least when analyzing over short time frames while viewing from outside the enterprise using only public information. It’s harder to say whether the pornocalypse in general is economically rational behavior or is a market distortion tied to monopoly control of the billing system, a monoculture of social class attitudes in the financial sector, or oligarchic control of cultural organs such as television and the press.
Well, another site to cross off my list for providing entertainment of all sorts.
Because so many aspects of the US economy are monopolies or monopsonies, if you line up the major actors in a sector behind some damn fool policy, nobody may be able to compete effectively. Businesses smaller than Amazon have to take what Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe say and like it.