+Violet Blue wrote up this article on ZD Net about indie publishers & PayPal.
"On Saturday February 18, PayPal began threatening indie book publishers and distributors with immediate deactivation of the businesses’ accounts if they did not remove books containing certain sexual themes – namely, specific sexual fantasies that PayPal does not approve of."
If you in any way publish your own content online and charge for its purchase via +PayPal – they could drop you as a merchant if they do not approve of the content of your book. They have already been in contact with a few major indie author sites. Some – out of fear of PayPal – jumped over a cliff removing all indie authors in one fell swoop from their listings.
"PayPal told indie e-book publishers and retailers – such as AllRomance, Smashwords, Excessica and Bookstrand – that if they didn’t remove the offending literature from their catalogs within a few days of notification, PayPal would close their accounts."
Technically Game of Thrones would not be elegible to be sold using PayPal as a merchant due to the sexual scenes between siblings in the book.
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PayPal Strong-Arms Indie Ebook Publishers Over Erotic Content | ZDNet
PayPal has forced its merchants that publish and distribute e-books to censor erotic literature.
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This is totally insane!
Of course, Paypal people reproduce via Mitosis…
Again an advertisement !
So I think that's a good idea!
Heard about this the day it happened. Have to wonder what the politics are behind this. Who has the big purse strings to force this issue since PayPal has been doing business with these companies for how long?
I could name a list of mainstream, massively popular bestsellers that defy the rules stated, but you can probably purchase them on other sites and still use PayPal.
Seems like an outright attack on smaller authors, which is sad.
it doesnt actually shape an entire market, just one small section of it that uses paypal instead of one of the many better sources out there. Also, being Indie doesnt mean they have to keep away from the Kindle/Nook/iBook stores