Kobo

Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that all Manifold Press titles vanished from Kobo's website during the recent purge. Whilst we completely understand Kobo's (and others') intentions to try to establish some kind of control or filtering process over the self-publishing/micro-publishing market, we also feel that there is absolutely nothing about our books that any but the most censorious reader could possibly take exception to. (Not liking them is one thing, but nobody could ever seriously argue that they're either bad or gratuitously obscene!) In fact, as we've pointed out to Kobo, very few of our books are more explicit than 'Brokeback Mountain' which remains on their list.

You'll gather from this that we've raised a formal query about this, and in fact we're doing whatever we can to try to get ourselves restored to Kobo's list (which is, admittedly, not much) - not least because we now have the bizarre situation whereby, for example, Chris's books with another publisher are still available but hers with us aren't, and there is to the best of our knowledge no significant difference in the quality or level of explicitness in the writing of them.

But the scale of the task must be enormous. There must be authors and publishers all over the world protesting that they've been unfairly treated, that their work should be made an exception, and having no idea of the level of staffing resources and expertise Kobo are able to apply to reviewing everything we can only conclude that it's going to take them some considerable time to sort it all out.

We suspect that those of you who've previously bought from Kobo's website are already fully aware of the situation and have made your own decisions about what to do in future. We're certainly not going to suggest any sort of protest or campaign in favour of Manifold Press's titles being restored to their list, which we suspect could be counter-productive, but if you do happen to think that a mistake may have been made in our case - well, a polite e-mail of enquiry to Kobo about our status certainly couldn't hurt. We'll leave you to decide whether or not you think that would be appropriate, and will only add that if you feel inclined to speak up on our behalf we here at Megaheadquarters will very much appreciate you taking the trouble. In any case, we hope to be back in favour with Kobo eventually - so please "watch this space" for further updates in due course!