Self-Publishing after Porn Scandal

With the rise of eBooks has come another trend that has been considered a threat to the publishing industry: self-publishing. It's not too difficult to discover the source of intimidation for traditional publishers. After all, what could be a more dismal prospect than writers and authors being able to completely overlook and set aside traditional publishers and publish their works on their own. But, it's not quite that simple. Considering the recent eBook porn scandal, forcing eBook sellers such as Kobo, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble to re-evaluate their screening methods for self-published books, it's clear that the self-publishing process has its flaws.

These retailers, who did have screening processes in place in order to monitor the content being sold on their sites, recently discovered that a number of pornographic self-published titles were appearing right next to children's books when a keyword as innocent as "daddy" was searched on their site. eBooks with subjects such as incest, rape, and bestiality were readily available for sale on their sites. The problem was that there were no measures in place to check the revisions made to an author's work once the title was actually published, and as a result, these retailers now must go back and clean up their stock. They are also faced with the issue of how best to screen the content available on their sites after they have been published. Not only is the issue of censorship being considered, but the credibility of self-publishing has taken a hit.

This scandal will certainly not decimate the self-publishing movement, or even a fraction of it. These sites will alter their screening processes and regain their integrity, and self-publishing will go on. But I think an event like this shows that, ultimately, traditional publishing still has more reliability and authority than self-publishing. It's possible to find a diamond in the rough when going through self-published works, but it's much easier to go directly to a book that has been traditionally published and is much more likely to be of better quality.