Porn Recommended For You

We went to Ebay to find a replacement piece of Tupperware because we don't know anyone who sells Tupperware. Thank God for that, of course, so there's no need to feel pressured to buy things from a friend at the home of another friend with all your friends watching to see what you're buying and you can't go cheap in that kind of atmosphere.

At the end of the list that Ebay put up for us in response to our search, there were a few other related items that Ebay thought we might like since we were looking for Tupperware and you never know if something else would catch a buyer's eye.

Related, to an extent.

One of the products that Ebay thought we might like was an e-book about a Tupperware party and judging by the book's cover it wasn't anything to do with food storage items. It was porn, from the vast assortment of digital books that slide under the radar as erotica. And no, Ebay, I was not the least interested in your suggested further purchase so if you'd be good enough to not recommend anything, I'd appreciate it.

Not Suitable For Children

As you'd guess, it was self-published by someone looking to make big money out of smut, which is a growing industry. Look over the listings at self-publishing venue Smashwords and you'll find a long list of offerings. Fifty Shades of Grey got its start as self-published erotica, so it is not so far out of the mainstream as you might think.

Some journalists at the U.K.'s Mail on Sunday discovered that the explosion of self-published titles has had an unintended consequence when it comes to traditional book sellers. To compete with the likes of Amazon, the brick-and-mortar shops have an online presence that gives their clients access to all the digital books that are out there. What no one realized, or hoped would go unnoticed, is that there are in incredible number of pornographic works out there in the ether, and running a search for a harmless term can bring up some truly sick works.

Like a search for Tupperware delivered a self-published piece of smut, so too did the writers at the British newspaper discover that "daddy" has many meanings in the dark world of the pervert. A simple search of the WHSmith website for books about "daddy" resulted in a list of books trading on incest as an acceptable form of sexual activity.

WHSmith was getting their e-books via Kobo, which operates a self-publishing platform that is supposed to filter out the worst porn, but with so many titles coming online, who could possibly vet every one of them?

The partnership will have to be revised, because WHSmith is running afoul of British law by making certain Kobo titles available. For now, the book vendor's website is down, until they can figure out how to offer ebooks to their customers who might otherwise go to Amazon, without allowing the self-published trash to fall in through the gaps.

It isn't as if they want to eliminate all self-published or small indie press books. But how can a search engine filter out the erotica when search terms tend to be fairly general?

Until they can figure out that puzzle, WHSmith is not selling anything on line.