by Jay Hartman
Q: Can you explain what’s happening with magazines over at Amazon?
A: Remember last month when I said you should pay attention to warning signs that Amazon is going to do something drastic with books eventually? The next phase in that evolution has arrived.
Citing “underperformance” of the category, Amazon has made the decision to eliminate magazines and journals for both Kindle and in print. That means that for all of you who subscribe to a periodical of some sort via Amazon to read on your device, your subscription just got changed from Martha Stewart Living to Dumpster Fire.
Amazon claims it’s going to encourage publishers to make the digital editions available via Kindle Unlimited, but of course there’s zero incentive for any publisher to do so. Even worse, KU isn’t available in South America, Latin America, the Middle East, large swathes of Asia, all of Scandinavia, and anything that’s Irish but isn’t part of the UK. That means the subscriber base for any journal or mag will drastically decrease.
In some cases, this means people who have no other way to access this material will no longer have access, period. In particular, small presses get hurt, as they rely on subscriptions to keep their doors open. This includes a lot of well-known favorites such as Alfred Hitchcock, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and many other industry leading productions.
Folks…diversify your distribution. I can’t say this enough. The alarm bells are sounding.
Q: What’s your take on the Roald Dahl / Goosebumps editing brouhaha?
A: I’d say it’s a mighty dangerous precedent and pretty darn scary.
For those of you who don’t know, the UK publishers of Roald Dahl’s titles and R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series recently announced that they planned to do edits on the books to make them more “appealing to all children.” It’s my understanding that after much backlash from the reading community at large, the publishers of Roald Dahl backtracked on the decision. Not so for Stine’s series.
Scholastic, the publisher of Goosebumps, has made edits to ebook editions with changes such as turning the word “crazy” into “silly” or “plump” into “cheerful.” Basically, if any word might be deemed offensive, Scholastic has changed it. Over 100 edits have been made to the Goosebumps series including to copies you already own. That’s right. If you purchased a ebook copy previously and you redownload it, you get the new, sanitized edition.
Author R.L. Stine claims he was never consulted about any of these changes and that there’s no way he would have approved it. Mind you, ol’ R. L. has gotten a bit…odd…in recent years but there’s not much reason to doubt what he’s saying is true.
Salman Rushdie has called this “absurd censorship,” and I can’t say I disagree with him. Books should be read and understood for the context and time in which they were written. This would be like editing Huckleberry Finn to remove any mentions of racism. Granted, the book would then be welcome on the shelves of Florida school libraries, but it doesn’t make it right. Authors should certainly have some say in what’s happening with their titles.
For now, this seems to be limited to the UK only and there’s no word from any American publishers of the same thing happening in the US but you James Bond lovers across the pond better get ready. At the end of this year, the Bond titles will be rereleased with edits made to remove things like race. The books will be stirred and it’ll be the readers who will be shaken.
Looking to get The Publisher Perspective? Send your questions to jhartman@untreedreads.com with TPP in your subject line. If your question is used, we’ll send you a free ebook from Untreed Reads.
Jay A. Hartman, editor-in-chief at Untreed Reads Publishing, founded Untreed Reads to promote ebooks with an emphasis on independent authors and publishers. He’s written about the ebook industry for fifteen years and previously served as content editor for KnowBetter.com, one of the internet’s oldest sites reporting on ebooks and epublishing.
