Unjapanologist

It's International Day Against DRM. Lovely opportunity to re-read the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Digital Books and Your Rights: A Checklist for Readers.

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It seems Amazon just suspended Digital Manga Inc. from publishing on Kindle entirely. Reportedly, this was done over an ill-defined "content violation" related to Digital Manga's yaoi titles. It's not the first time that yaoi titles are the subject of censorship kerfuffles, but apparently Amazon is still not planning to clarify its famously vague guidelines about "pornography" versus "erotica".

(Apple is engaging in disturbingly similar practices, apparently keeping out yaoi titles and other LGBTQ content from its iBooks store. Digital Manga was told to remove its yaoi titles from its iPad app on February 2. It's a bad, bad thing when distributors get to control what appears on people's reading devices and can use drm to lock people even further into their walled gardens.)

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ETA: The text above contained a reference to taking my business to the The Book Depository, but eggsbenedict points out that The Book Depository was bought by Amazon last year. I don't know exactly how this is impacting the running of the company, but removed the reference just to make sure. Apparently Amazon also owns Abebooks and a bunch of other book-related companies, including some I use and give money to, such as LibraryThing.

Again, I don't know what being owned by Amazon means for these companies and if it has any influence on, for instance, their content policies. Maybe there's no influence. However, it does seem clear that I'm absolutely unable to buy legal copies of some of the e-books I want or need for work without financially benefiting Amazon. It's not a sign of a healthy system if it's completely impossible anywhere in the world to buy a legal copy of a certain book without somehow going through this one single distributor.

From the department of research-related things that happened while I was too busy to remember I have a journal... The latest issue of Transformative Works and Cultures contains a book review by me of Boys' love manga: essays on the sexual ambiguity and cross-cultural fandom of the genre (ed. Antonia Levi, Mark McHarry, and Dru Pagliassotti). Like most academic books, this one contained a few weaker chapters, but I found it very informative in general. It puts a nice amount of emphasis on fan-related topics, which is why I'd heartily recommend it to English-language fan studies researchers who want to find out more about yaoi/boys' love -although nothing beats actually reading some, of course.

(Random e-book note: the Kindle edition of this book costs half as much as the print edition, $19.25, but that price still made me go "whoa" for a second. I've been conditioned to tolerate e-book prices up until $13 or so. Anything above that makes me think twice about purchasing something.)