Methynks OP doth make his minde confvsed twixt Amazon and ye auld Apple Store.
That site looks like a pretty good idea for making money. While most readers probably won’t buy the “worst things,” they are probably likely to click through to see the details and might buy something on Amazon.
As for the “porn,” I’m missing the point of the post. Amazon allows a lot of people to sell a lot of things, and some of them write “erotica.” I thought this was going to be about hardcore porn films or something.
Now they need to make a Mother TereStraw
The sales rank is 150,000 or so.
If it was a paper book, that would be maybe one sale per day.
It isn’t being sold OFTEN, and it’s only three bucks.
Not exactly a sensation.
The review for that was comic gold. Loved it.
Anyone else reminded of the “Gay Fish” episode of South Park?
Well, that’s just Japan all over, ain’t it?
Do they eat pudding?
In the original, a queen places herself inside a wooden cow with her vagina up against an appropriate opening and a real bull does the rest. That’s where the Minotaur comes from. That’s what’s at the foundation of Western High Culture. You’re welcome.
When i think of sex & fishes, I think of The Simpsons, A Fish Called Selma.
Mobster 1: "I thought you said he was dead?!"
Mobster 2: “No, I said he sleeps with the fishes.”
Mobster 1: “Ewwwww.”
Speaking of Japan, Amazon.jp has been selling porn DVDs for a few years.
A friend of mine writes, and sells, erotica through Amazon, for Kindle, as well as other stuff, and it seems to sell. Certainly, there are publishers paying her to do it.
Probably the big advantage of reading erotica on an e-reader is that no-one else can see what you’re reading. Also useful for reading Dan Brown or Twilight in polite company.
Easy explanation. The Worst Things For Sale is very popular. You are seeing “also viewed” because they are all things featured on TWTFS. See?
Imagine if the OP had stumbled upon classy titles like the five volumes of Cum Fart Cocktails.
If you look at the similar titles on Amazon or do a Google search on Luna Loupe’s keywords, you’ll immediately notice that most of the authors of this type of erotica are female and their audience is similarly female. This is a huge change from the porn of our youth, which was almost 100% male written and aimed.
Women appear to be less willing to depend on old-fashioned porn story sites, which are often connected to or parts of larger video porn sites. Those seem to still be male dominated (and in the other sense as well, an additional turn-off). The romance genre was an early adapter of e-books, and romance erotica has a hockey stick growth trend that would kill us if CO[sub]2[/sub] buildup were as steep. That’s a huge audience primed to look for downloadable e-books to read on an electronic device. I’m also assuming that women aren’t as likely as men to masturbate to a computer screen.
Amazon hit on the perfect delivery system with the Kindle. It’s portable and private. Anybody can upload words and call it a book, and it will display on its own page as if it were a book. The story that set this off is all of 12 pages. Most of Loupe’s “books” are short stories. I’ll bet that most readers don’t check the page count before buying; the theme and description hooks them. The Kindle put amateurs who had no venue for these fantasies on a par with world famous authors. There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of Kindle-only titles swelled by the numbers who got through other publishers or Smashwords or other cross-platform sites. Instead of throwing away a story on a free site, they have the satisfaction of releasing a “book” on a respectable site that gets millions of hits every day, that is easily searchable, that people do reviews for on other sites, and that makes money for each sale. Assuming the 70% royalty option, Loupe makes $2.10 minus handling fees on each book.
Why does Amazon do this? It keeps the other 30% of list price, in this case 90 cents. How much is that is profit? 90 cents. The incremental cost of adding a display page to its listings and storing the words on its servers is essentially nothing. That’s right. Amazon has invented a business model that is pure profit. You have to stand back and admire that. Yes, it took a lot of spending to get them to this point, with the development costs of the Kindle, and the maintenance of the server farms, and all that. But on a per item sold basis, that cost is minimal and most of it is recoverable by Kindle sales, cloud computing charges, and all the other pots Amazon has. The e-book end is pure gravy.
Amazon, not Apple, not Google, has the best business model of anyone. Green is never tasteless.
Search typo involving Amanda Cuddlefitch.
Drew has many other projects that I’d recommend. Toothpaste For Dinner is a single panel cartoon. Then there is his music; Fuck You If You Don’t Like Christmas is my favorite xmas tune. Drew did a “rap” CD under his rap persona “Crudbump”. Worth a listen.
Amazon is not in the business of censoring material. Nor should they be. What would be the cost of hiring enough staff to examine every item they list to make a judgment as to whether it meets any particular standard?
There is a link to customer reviews of all their products, which, presumably, would alert buyers to products that some users have found offensive.