A bestselling book on The Kindle is called "Compromising Positions," and it's about an uptight businessman getting tangled up with a wild woman who introduces him to all sorts of interesting workouts (Sorry, I'm trying to keep this post relatively PG).
Anyway, you won't find the title on the NYT bestsellers list or Publisher's Weekly, but it's a topseller on Kindle. Why? It might have something to do with the fact that the book is available for free and it’s instantly downloadable. The publisher is doing this with hopes that readers will pay for future titles.
This article in Slate brings up many interesting points about the "Compromising Positions" phenomenon -- about the giveaway tactic, about the new genre of romance novel targeting men, etc. -- but what I found most interesting is the move of porn into this relatively new medium:
"Like the Kindle itself, the marriage of porn and e-reader is relatively new; much of this digital erotica has been added to the Kindle library in the last 18 months or so. From a technology standpoint, anyone who's seen Boogie Nights or Middle Men could predict this development. Every time a major new content platform—print, film, cable, VHS, DVD, the Internet, mobile phones—has experienced massive growth, it has either been driven by a porn boom or at least brought the porn industry along for the ride. (The biggest exception is probably radio.)"
This seems to support what my team learned while doing our IS-SI project on DivX. Not only is porn one of the most frequently watched type of content -- the industry has historically been among the first to use and support new technologies. It would be interesting to see what role (if any) adult fiction plays as eReaders become increasingly mainstream.
Which also makes one wonder, what does Netflix have against adult content?
