David Gaughran

Self-publishing savant David Gaughran had to digest the bitter irony of seeing his own titles on self-publishing taken offline in the mass cull of self-published ebooks that followed the recent revelations of freely accessible extreme porn on popular ebook platforms. He has tracked the whole farce since its inception. I asked him for his view of the latest developments.

TeleRead: What are you seeing in terms of inoffensive, uncontroversial ebooks being taken offline after the ebook purge began?

David Gaughran: It’s hard to know how many books Kobo has removed because they won’t tell us. Most authors don’t even realise their books are gone because you can only view the Kobo UK store if you are in the UK (it defaults to your local Kobo store based on your IP address).

All we know for sure is that all books distributed to Kobo via Draft2Digital (which is almost 8,000 titles) have been removed, globally. Whitcoulls (Kobo’s NZ partner) has closed their ebookstore and WHSmith closed their entire site.

With respect to the Kobo UK store, I tested ten self-publishers (none of whom write erotica) yesterday and half were gone. In the last couple of hours, my books were returned on sale, but most still seem to be missing. Out of the authors I tested yesterday, only one had his books returned to sale this morning.

Of course, there’s a danger this madness will spread further, as Kobo seem to be at the mercy of their partner sites.

TeleRead: Do you consider the reactions of the various ebook platforms appropriate and proportionate?

David Gaughran: Even the Daily Mail admitted that not all of the titles they highlighted were self-published, yet Kobo’s actions seem to be exclusively aimed at self-publishers, including, of course, tens of thousands of authors who haven’t breached any retailers’ policies. It’s crazy. And it sets a terrible precedent that Kobo would react in such a draconian, ham-fisted way to a tabloid article.

TeleRead: What do you think of how the tradeoff between public protection versus authors’ rights and freedom of expression was handled in this particular case?

David Gaughran: We don’t know all the details yet, but it seems that this was a failure on the part of both Kobo and their partner sites to adequately handle adult content. Obviously, nobody wants children to stumble across this stuff, but there are long established ways of filtering adult content so that doesn’t happen. The problem with Kobo is that their search function has always been terrible, and this is probably a function of that. I’m very troubled that Kobo’s answer to this problem was to pull self-published books en masse. They wouldn’t try this with Random House.

TeleRead:  Is there room for a class action lawsuit or other formal counter move by authors against ebook platforms regarding the action that was taken?

David Gaughran: I’m not a lawyer but I doubt that’s either possible or desirable. Do authors really want to start suing retailers? I can’t see a positive outcome to that for anybody. A more fruitful avenue might be discussing how we can react in concert and apply pressure to make sure we are treated the same as other publishers.
 

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