Oh Daddy, you know that eBook you bought for me…*

The morality police achieved another victory in their battle to return us to the days of covered table legs yesterday when high street retailer WH Smith (SMWH) took their entire website offline.

Why the drastic action? Because the Daily Fail (that bastion of the soft-porn click-bait) happened to notice that if you searched for ‘daddy’, the site listed a number of books that could not be considered as suitable for children. I do wonder though how many children are a) going to be using the SMWH website and b) how may are going to be searching for daddy. Heck, I’m an adult whose interests could be considered quite wide-ranging but I don’t think I’ve ever used that term in any search box anywhere on the web.

That SMWH have taken such drastic action isn’t much as a surprise as they have history when it comes to bowing to the whims of special interest groups.

In order to solve the ‘problem’, which is limited to self-published items, SMWH have decided that, once their website returns, they are going to not list any eBooks which fall into this category for the forseeable future – regardless of their content.

Personally I’d suggest that a better approach would be to update their search functionality to include such basic abilities as ‘safe-search’ and ‘include/exclude self-published items’ but that would require knee-jerk puritans not to be knee-jerk puritans…

* With apologies to Christine McVie and Fleetwood Mac

5 Comments

  1. Stephan Loy says:

    My knee just jerked. A ‘safe search’ option seems a no-brainer, but why an option to single out self-published work? Some of the best stuff I’ve read has been self-published. I myself am a self-published author. I’m tired of self-publishing being auto-equated to dreck. Granted, the self-publishing world is full to bursting with dreck, which means unedited garbage filled with spelling, grammar and reasoning mistakes as well as porn, but publishing houses put out as much porn as anyone and neither are they immune to poorly edited, poorly considered books. I would kiss anyone, no matter how ugly or how rough their beard, if they developed and fielded an algorithm that searched files for incompetent use of the language and poor story structure. Now that would be a filter worth having.

    • Misanthrope Girl says:

      My intention was not to cast self-published work as uniformly awful as I know that it is not, merely to try and suggest less drastic methods that SMWH could have tried.

      Ironically, they did quite well out of the rather appalling (and originally self-published) ’50 Shades of Grey’ sequence so I wonder if that (and its derivatives) will survive the planned cull…

  2. JuliaM says:

    I can’t see them ever challenging the Kindle’s supremacy even without this kerfuffle…

    And I see PETA got someone sacked because a large department store decided to offer fur-trimmed clothes. Don’t these people ever stop to think that once they give in to a single- issue group of loons, they are now hostages to fortune for all the others out there?

    • Misanthrope Girl says:

      Corporate PR never seems to think about anything beyond the agenda-driven, overly hysterical newspaper headlines. Much like political PR.

  3. jameshigham says:

    The tyranny of Kindle.