Krazykiwi @ Kiwitopia

Follow-up to W.H. Smith in the UK dropping self-pub books from their webstore: 

(Which if you missed, you can read about here: 

http://krazykiwi.booklikes.com/post/604689/major-uk-retailer-removing-all-self-pub-books-from-website )

New Developments: In short because a few erotica authors couldn't resist cheating the keywords to get around the adult/erotica filters, resulting in "daddy" porn showing up in the kids section, this has now spread from a single national retailer, into a major international distributor.

As a result of this, Kobo world wide is now purging all books (not just erotica) from  self-pub distributors DIrect2Digital. D2D is a big alternative to Createspace, and feeds books to B&N, Kobo (well until now), itunes and Amazon - as well as a lot of national chains in places you haven't heard of and where Amazon has very little footprint, like Sweden. It's popular for people who want to access the itunes bookstore but don't have macs (formatting a book for itunes normally requires mac-only software), and it's also popular for people who simply don't want to trust the entire process to the Amazon machine. It's basically a upload once, get in every store solution, so killing the D2D feed to kobo is basically cutting off the non-amazon/smashwords marketplace for most indies. 

It's also worth noting, Kobo is not exactly the smalltime e-book hardware setup a lot of people think, they are as of 2012 part of the monster Japanese conglomerate Rakuten, which includes buy.com, play.com, and ozon.ru (if you're american you may not be aware, but these are MAJOR players in the market in the EU,UK and Russia respectively) and partly owns Pinterest. Along with a whole bunch of other things like banks :) 

Here's some of the typical trade talk about Rakuten: Outside the US, they are considered very serious competitors to Ebay and Amazon, in case you're interested: http://ebaystrategies.blogs.com/ebay_strategies/2010/06/rakuten-buycom-makes-second-large-acquisition-in-less-than-30-days.html (and this was before they took on Kobo and Ozon)

To round this up, once again, some few BBA self-pubbers have used unethical business practices to ruin the credibility of the entire independent publishing industry.