By The Numbers: Indie Publishing Really Does Have an Issue with Porn
When the mainstream media made indie publishing into a synonym for pornography last week I was both appalled and infuriated. Many sites, including The Daily Mail and The Kernel, were reporting on the news less because it was news and more for the tabloidistic shock value.
But as annoying as that may be, today I am going to have to admit that there was more than a grain of truth in the reports. It’s not just media hype; indie publishing has a porn problem.
Or rather, indie publishing has a far higher concentration of erotica and adult content than is found in traditionally published content. I personally don’t see that as a problem, but I can see how others might.
Aaron Stanton, the founder of BookLamp and the Book Genome Project, was the first to really look for data which could shed light on this topic. Over on Digital Book World last night he posted some details from an analysis in which he compared a slice of the indie published titles that BookLamp has analyzed with the traditionally published titles that have been fed through BookLamp’s system.
Aaron found some rather startling results:
Over 28% of the 15,000 indie titles which were collated for this comparison were erotica, compared to less than 2% of the 100,000 plus traditionally published titles in BookLamp’s database.
As you may know, BookLamp has developed a way to analyze the text of a book and identify details like the writing style and major themes. They call this the book’s genome, and it is that genome that was used to classify the ebooks as erotica.
To be more exact, BookLamp searched each book for sexual content and then created a chart like the one above. Each green square represents 1,00 words with no sexual content, yellow means some, and red, well. As you can see 50 Shades clearly belongs in the erotica category, and it was not alone.
Getting back to the survey group as a whole, Aaron also reported that BookLamp found that around 3% of indie titles involved questionable themes:
Now, one could argue that this single source does not reflect the actual titles available, which is true. In fact there’s really no way to know for sure without feeding a sample group the size of the entire Kindle Store through BookLamp’s servers and collating the results.
Given the cost and logistical issues involved, that is probably not going to happen. And that’s why I went looking for another source of data:
Smashwords
This ebook distributor carries all types of content, including erotica, so I took a moment to see just how many titles they carried in the erotica section. I found that the SW website listed 48,000 titles in that section, out of a total 256,000 titles.
That is around 18% of all titles in the Smashwords catalog.
And these are just the self-identified erotica titles; there could be more listed in other sections. I was debating this issue with Aaron last night, and he pointed out that:
I don’t think it’s necessarily accurate to make the assumption that a book with erotic content will always be in the erotic section, or classified as such. Many times books that statistically should be categorized as erotica by their amount of sexual content (and would have been by a traditional publisher) are not when published independently.
But even though there is a demonstrably higher concentration of erotica among indie-published titles, I still think that it is a misnomer to label the group based on a minority of the content. And I think it is wrong to punish a group for the actions of a minority.
But that’s what happened last week both in the media and in ebookstores when Kobo, Amazon, et al purged a wide variety of indie-published ebooks from their ebookstore, including titles which were not questionable nor even vaguely resembled erotica.
Now that we can see the scope of this issue I think it’s even more clear that last week’s purge was a solution out of proportion to the problem at hand.
What do you think?
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