I’ve been busy fixing up my new home taking care of the essentials and sprucing the place up. Essentials include fixing broken items, removing dead critters from dark recesses, yard maintenance, and rescuing a neglected deck. When there’s extra minutes to spare I clean, polish, and paint. All that and I continue working near normal hours, maybe a little less. It’s exciting—including the dead things.

Writing fiction is on hold for a while at least until my imaginary friends start bugging me again.

Dee Count 1.4 minor update includes improved art for the new iPad and not much else. Use the software support form to send suggestions or requests.

As noted by Mark Coker on the Smashwords blog, “PayPal Revises Policies to Allow Legal Fiction,” PayPal has worked with the ebook community to adjust their terms covering sales of erotica content.

This is about distributing legal fiction, and always has been. As stated in my previous post, it’s about money and the law. The difference between obscene and literary value sometimes becomes debatable, but it should be the responsibility of the retailers and community to determine.

I don’t blame credit card companies for trying protect themselves, or increase their revenue by taking advantage of sales of questionably obscene material, but it’s in everyone’s best interest to find a fair way for everyone to continue business. Ebook retailers risk may increase, but I believe most of them already take responsibility and work with the community like Smashwords has shown.

In the last few weeks, PayPal has asked several ebook vendors including Smashwords and Bookstrand, to remove their erotica titles in order to continue service sparking a number of articles from sites like Huffington Post and TechCrunch. See “The PayPal Fiction Crackdown Roundup” at Dear Author for a background overview. Several bloggers and commenters have brought up morality and censorship, some asking how a payment transaction service can decide what vendors may sell. It’s not about morality or corporations trying to control others.

It’s about money and the law.

Some have brought up censorship and morality enforcement including the TechCrunch post which says, “it’s clear that PayPal thinks it can police the Internet.” The “morality police” claims (one comment and another,) seem to come from PayPal trying to categorize books with defined subject matter as noted by Mark Coker of Smashwords in an email to authors posted here that, “Their hot buttons are bestiality, rape-for-titillation, incest and underage erotica.” This would appear to include some mainstream and historical books, but likely this is an attempt by PayPal‘s acquiring banks to differentiate obscene erotica from romance and other literature.

Mark Coker identified the source of the problem in his second email to authors posted here with this statement:

PayPal is trying to implement the requirements of credit card companies, banks and credit unions. This is where it’s all originating. These same requirements will eventually rain down upon every other payment processor.

This has already been going on in other industries doing business on the web including porn, gambling, dieting and tobacco. These are considered by banks as high risk (see list on merchant-accounts-services.org) due to higher than normal fraud, chargebacks, or questionably legal sales. Any vendor may be considered a high risk if their chargebacks are greater than one percent, but the banks and processors categorize certain businesses as high risk from chargeback statistics or industries that may have a history of illegal activities. It’s also to a money processor’s advantage to categorize sales of questionably obscene materials or services as high risk to charge more fees.

Vendors selling merchandise or services in these high-risk areas pay extra fees as outlined by instabill.com on their Adult Merchant Account used by some porn sites. However, porn sites still have to be careful about what is depicted due to laws about distributing obscene materials.

The US law forbids distribution of obscene materials—which are not protected by the First Amendment. The Miller Test from US Supreme Court in 1973 defines obscene material as satisfying three conditions (source):

• the average person would find that the work, taken as a whole and applying contemporary community standards, appeals to the prurient interest;
• the work depicts or describes sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, when applying contemporary community standards; and
• the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

Selena Kitt, an ebook publisher of Excessica and erotica author, makes the point on her blog (http://theselfpublishingrevolution.blogspot.com/2012/02/slippery-slope-erotica-censorship.html) that PayPal would rather not pay for high-risk accounts, and so must comply. In her search for an alternative, Selena Kitt found out that Amazon Payments have a similar rule against the sale of “‘sexually explicit materials.’” In a comment of the TechCrunch post, she continues saying that she has tried many other merchant accounts for credit card processing, including those specializing in porn sites, and turned down for “‘illegal activity.’”

Why now? PayPal has been processing transactions from these vendors for years, likely under the assumption that none of the ebooks being sold were obscene and the vendors doing their due diligence to remove obscene ebooks. Now they know, or they believe there is a risk. There is no attempt at policing the internet here. PayPal is following terms of service with banks to reduce risk.

The rising success of erotica authors has captured the attention of credit card companies that don’t want to risk becoming involved in accepting payments for (questionably) illegal sales. Ebooks containing rape, incest, or bestiality is not a problem as long as the work as a whole is considered artistic, scientific, or has literary value. Vendors like Smashwords and Excessica need to fight showing that they take care in removing purely obscene materials, and even then they may still find themselves in a high-risk category without PayPal services due to varying views on what is considered to have no literary or artistic merit. The banks and credit cards still want their fees. If there is enough profit in erotica literature, then someone will find a way to continue selling likely to come with higher fees. After all, it’s about money.

Note:  I don’t read erotica, I have no knowledge if any of these vendors have ever sold obscene ebooks, and I’m not a legal expert. I think it’s fair to say there is a perceived risk of distributing obscene materials—no different than any other adult entertainment—whether that perception is based on law or monetary gain.

It’s Read an Ebook Week, March 4-10. As part of the fun, my ebooks are free on Smashwords using coupon code RE100.

Shadow Memories, collection of shorts.

Raven Memory, a novel.

Kandy Fangs, a novella. Always free.

Learn more about Read an Ebook Week at ebookweek.com.

1.3 includes a productivity improvement and a fix.  Learn more about Dee Count for iPad.

Productivity Improvement

The custom count button (?) now updates the value and selects the button beside it (normally a 12) allowing for quicker repeated custom count entries. The custom button remains denoted by the question mark, and the third button becomes your custom value. The custom entry pad now always starts blank for quicker entry. This is perfect for when there are several products without barcodes that are counted by hand. In the older versions, this required an extra button tap and deleting the current custom value.

Screen shot of new count buttons

In the above screen shot, the current count selection is 3 and the custom entry is set to 5. Tapping the ? opens the count by entry pad.

Screen shot of custom count entry

Let’s say we have a product missing a bar code, and we counted by hand to find 24 on the shelf. Enter 24 and tap OK. The 24 is already selected, so we type in the product code.

Screen shot of adjusted custom count entry

Fixed

In landscape orientation, sometimes several of the action menu buttons didn’t work. Now works in iOS5 and iOS4, tested in iPad 2 and original iPad.

In Dee Count with iOS 5 there seems to be a glitch with the actions menu. When the menu shows up at half-height, some of the buttons don’t work. I’m looking into it. A workaround is to turn the iPad to the tall orientation and re-open the menu.

I spent more on writing fiction than I earned. No surprise. I write for Torre. This was also a very busy year at MotiveQuest where I spent extra hours upgrading software to meet demand leaving me with very little time for writing or reading. Somehow I managed to finish Dee Count for iPad and Kandy Fangs story, both projects started in 2010.

All of my stories are available for free (on blog, download, or by asking,) and I consider paid ebooks as donations (and supporting retailers) in appreciation of fiction. Find where to download my ebooks for your favorite reader on my Books page.

2011 Sales

At the beginning of the year, I announced that I would donate my 2011 ebook proceeds (as of Dec 15th) to Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP.) For transparency, here are my 2011 sales numbers for my books as of December 15, 2011.

Shadow Memories

• Paid: 3, 1 each at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo
• Free: 28 at Smashwords Summer/Winter Sale

Raven Memory

• Paid: 2, 1 at Amazon and 1 at Sony Reader Store

Kandy Fangs

• Free at Smashwords: 198
• Free at Barnes & Noble: 161
• Free at Scribd: 3 (embedded reads + downloads)

For comparison, in 2010 I sold 7 Shadow Memories, and 4 Raven Memory ebooks plus 30 free downloads.

Donation to KIPP

On behalf of readers, I donated my proceeds from paid ebook sales (ignoring my writing expenses) plus 10 cents for every free ebook download listed above to KIPP. This works out to be $4.62 for paid ebook sales plus $39.00 in thanks for free ebook downloads for a result rounded up to $50. I matched for total of US $100 donated to KIPP.

Thanks for reading my stories.

Dear Elsa,

The crisp nights in Skyrim remind me of home. Aurora is like a constant companion waving her shimmering veil over the mountains. So far, I’ve managed to stay out of the local war keeping busy between my studies at the mage’s college and high paying jobs, mostly dangerous work.

Forever yours,
Ezekiel

Dear Elsa,

The snow seems to hide some towns, nearly forgotten, rumor calling their names. I’ve been granted the use of a rather intimidating horse. The beast stands out in the snow like dark flame. You might be surprised to learn I’ve gain the admiration of a warrior. Mjoll the Lioness they call her. She’s been accompanying me without pay, though I outfitted her with a special dark armor and often shower her with enchanted jewelry. We make quite the team. At times she engages an opponent while I strike from the shadows, and sometimes we fight shoulder-to-shoulder clearing out the catacombs of their walking dead.

Truly yours,
Ezekiel

Dear Elsa,

I’ve somehow climbed into a leadership role within the college. They seem happy with my performance. Mjoll continues to follow me. I’m uncertain what drives her more, traveling the countryside or the spirit of battle. I seem to have a talent for finding battle. I’m certain she suspects given my insistence on traveling at night and other routine habits. She will often remind me of her hatred for vampires, yet she continues to travel with me and even protect me with the fire only a Nord could command. It must be the battle.

Always yours,
Ezekiel

___________________________________________________________________________

Screen shots from Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim by Bethesda Softworks, Inc.

The iOS 5 update allows for undocking or splitting the on-screen keyboard making the iPad easier for using while holding in two hands or to see more content. To undock, hold down on the keyboard hide button (lower-right corner) and select from the dialogue to undock or split. Hold-and-slide the same button to move around the screen.

The screen shots show my app, Dee Count, with the keyboard moved away from the bottom. If you return to using your bar-code scanner and eject later to type in text, your on-screen keyboard will return to where you last positioned it. To dock, hold down the keyboard button and select the dock dialogue.