Good news for those of us who buy ebooks! We can now pass them onto our children, as long as we live in the state of Delaware. And maybe other states (and countries?) will follow. From the Digital Reader:
Do you know that clause in the TOS for the Kindle Store and many other digital content stores which says that the content is licensed to you and is nontransferable?
The state of Delaware just negated that clause (in part) . . .
To read the rest of Digital Reader's post follow this Link.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote 'Is Censorship Contagious?' commenting on the removal of the thousands of self-published titles from sale at Kobo (along with several other major retailers) with little notice given to their authors. Well, it now appears Kobo's Chief Content Officer Michael Tamblyn has elaborated on the situation by emailing the following statement to those affected:
W.H. Smith have shut down their website entirely, after some questionable content (they don't say, but probably some crazy niche erotica) got onto their web shop via the kobo self-publishing feed.
Their response: Their site is currently closed, and they have instead a statement (Reproduced below the fold for posterity).
They are removing ALL self-published e-books from their website. ALL of them. Not just the ones they get published via Kobo.
In scale this is like B&N closing their website, W.H. Smith is HUGE in the UK. It must be costing them millions of pounds per day to do this, and the site's been down a couple of days already apparently.
My guess what happened: self-pub erotica authors mis-categorizing their product, in order to get around the fact that stores like W.H. Smith filter the incoming e-book feeds to remove and/or wall off the erotica - there's a lot of speculation this is also behind the currently ongoing 'zon crackdown on adult content. And by doing this, they have pretty much stabbed all self-published authors in the neck. Good going guys.
Statement below (ETA, title was unclear, shelves on the e-book store, not physical, this is only about e-books so far)
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