By Porter Anderson | @Porter_Anderson
Writing on the Ether: Kobo’s Feast of Burden
[su_dropcap size=”4″]A[/su_dropcap]t The Bookseller’s magenta-toned FutureBook Conference in London. Nigel Roby, Philip Jones, their efficient staff, and many game speakers led us through a good and very pink day of concept and comment highlighted by a 12-minute presentation from Michael Tamblyn, content chief at Kobo.
Tamblyn broke through the usual code of corporate silence. When things go wrong in large business settings in our digital age, the common mode of response is dictated by Legal. And Legal loves to gag a workforce. No one from the company in question is to speak. No one is to talk. Not even to say things that could help the wider world understand the corporation’s difficult decisions.
What Tamblyn gave us was not only a glimpse of what his company was facing while many of us freely bad-mouthed it for the nine days of the October ordeal, but also a deeply disturbing, problematic issue we all must now take to heart very carefully.
Every decision has two kinds of risk. Let the wrong book pass and you have the risk of alienating customers or bad press or breaking the law… But also the other risk, the greater danger, the possibility, however vanishingly small, that the book you are filtering out is the next Tropic of Cancer or Justine or Lolita.
Read the full post and great comments at: JaneFriedman.com