Flutterby™! : Smashwords shoots itself

Last week, Smashwords, an online publisher of ebooks, modified their terms of service to forbid "...erotic fiction that contains bestiality, rape and incest.".

Remittance Girl has an open letter to Smashwords' Mark Coker on the new policy that's well worth reading.

No, sir. Smashwords is requiring the removal of these books to maintain its relationship with Paypal. Please let us be clear on this. I am sure your aspirations regarding the founding of Smashwords were and are very noble. But it is YOU who have decided to let a financial services provider dictate your TOS and therefore impose censorship on the authors who post their works on your site.

Secondly, you, like so many other people seem to have intellectual difficulty in distinguishing between the textual, fictional representation of something and reality. The language you use in your letter is evidence of a conceptual inability to do so. You are not alone in this: forces within our society who wish to ‘protect us’ from ourselves have used this blurring of the fictional with the concrete to great effect, whipping people who also can’t distinguish the fundamental difference up into froths of moral outrage.

No Boundaries Press sees this as an opportunity.