It's now Illegal to sell adult ebooks before 10 PM in Germany

It's now Illegal to sell adult ebooks before 10 PM in Germany(the-digital-reader.com)

15 points by user_666 10 years ago | 6 comments

kwhitefoot 10 years ago |

Are adult ebooks that one pays for reliably better than the the stuff on literotica.com?

It's hardly necessary to pay people to write, it's nearly impossible to stop them. Of course someone with real talent should be paid because then they will be able to concentrate on it without worrying about paying the rent.

But the best selling 'adult' book of recent time was Fifty Shades which is hardly a book of great literary quality so I suspect that the simplest way around the ban is to just read free stories.

bayesianhorse 10 years ago |

It may be impossible to enforce this ban completely, but that doesn't mean that major sellers won't follow it and the others, those who are based in Germany, will get fined. Could be quite lucrative actually...

My personal thinking though is that this was a legislatory mistake. Not selling erotica on Television before 10pm was a good thing, back then. And it didn't matter until now.

joshuapants 10 years ago |

I wonder if this will end up getting amended before it gets meaningfully enforced.

Otherwise, is there anything stopping erotic ebook sellers from just putting their servers in a different country?

bayesianhorse 10 years ago | |

That may be harder to achieve than you might think. Big sellers would have lots of employees inside Germany and smaller sellers may be reluctant to setup a multi-national business...

Zak 10 years ago | | |

Assuming we're talking about German language content, it's likely small sellers would exist in Austria and Switzerland servicing that market. Furthermore, it wouldn't be terribly difficult for someone small to medium sized who doesn't specialize in German language content to include such content in a larger library.

All of this is absurd in an age where anyone can just type "hardcore porn" or any of myriad more specific requests in to google.

user_666 10 years ago | | |

Yep. Amazon, Kobo, Apple, and Google (55% of the ebook market) all have operations in Germany. They cannot pull out, and nor can the local sellers that account for 40% of the ebook market.