We accept all kinds of content, because we believe in freedom of expression. However, we review all books manually to ensure that none of the books infringe any rights or are hateful or offensive in any way. During the manual review process, we use guidelines similar to the major ebook stores, such as Amazon Kindle and Google Play Books.
Your books and book related content (such as book titles, cover art and product descriptions) must adhere to these content guidelines. Additionally, some of the stores have their own specific standards your content will need to adhere to: they might not accept certain words in the description or require your book to be put in a specific category. We reserve the right to make judgements about whether content is appropriate and to choose not to offer it in some of the stores.
Restricted (adult) content
Adult content is typically recommended only for readers over 18 years, because it contains erotic or violent scenes. A book has to be tagged as adult if it is not generally thought to be appropriate for viewing by children.
In this sense, Fifty Shades of Grey is considered to be adult content (in addition to being categorized as new adult/contemporary romance/erotica as well).
We accept adult content, but please make sure that your content still does not contain pornography. Images of nudity with educational, artistic, historical, or documentary value are accepted.
We don’t accept pornography or offensive depictions of graphic sexual acts. This includes material falling under the following categories:
- Depiction (photo or drawing) of a child in a sexual situation, even without contact
- Photographs or drawings of penetrative sex, oral/genital contact, or genitals
- Images of nudity and/or sexually explicit audio descriptions with no educational, artistic, historical, or documentary value
- Textual encouragement to commit a crime (e.g., books supporting, encouraging or defending rape, pedophilia, incest or bestiality, or books detailing how to commit a sexual crime)
- Graphic content intended for the sole purpose of sexual arousal
- Excessively objectionable or crude content
- Content that drives traffic to pornographic online services
- Sexually explicit text in any book metadata (i.e. titles, subtitles or descriptions)
Offensive Content
What we deem offensive is in accordance with the UN hate speech guidelines and regulations. Users may not publish material that promotes hate towards any identifiable or protected group or individual. Protected groups and individuals include those based on race or ethnicity, nationality (including citizenship), religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, sexual orientation, or gender identity.
We have a zero-tolerance policy towards books that promote or encourage any form of physical or verbal abuse towards children.
Additionally, your book's cover art cannot depict any extremist symbolism, for example, Nazi symbols. Many countries have laws restricting the publication of certain symbols, which can result in your book being banned.
Incitement to violence or terrorism is not permitted. This includes materials that are intended to harass, or which threaten to cause serious physical injury or death to an individual or rally support to physically harm others. In addition, we will not allow extremely graphically violent or scatological materials.
Animal cruelty
We do not accept books that promote cruelty against animals in any form.
Illegal and Infringing Content
We take violations of law and proprietary rights very seriously. It is your responsibility to ensure that your content doesn’t violate law or copyright, trademark, privacy, publicity, or other rights. Please be aware that freely available content doesn’t mean free to sell content – always obtain the rights before you sell something. This is true not only for text but also for images and fonts used.
Public Domain and Other Non-Exclusive Content
Please read our public domain policy here.
Please read our PLR policy here.
Spamming
Publishers spamming us with multiple versions of the same or similar books may be blocked from distribution. This also includes books that share or use the same images, text, or other content, promotional books and commercial books.
Books that primarily consist of free and easily available content may be rejected. For example, we cannot accept books that repackage content from online sources such as open access encyclopedias, online forums and tutorials, or Q&A websites.
Poor Customer Experience
We don’t accept books that provide poor customer experience. We reserve the right to determine which content would fall under this guideline. See the Guide to Kindle Content Quality for examples of content that’s typically disappointing for customers.
Examples of unacceptable content include:
- Content that is either marketed as a subscription service or redirects readers to an external source to obtain the original text/full content.
- Content that is freely available on the web (unless you are the copyright owner of that content or the content is in the public domain).
- Content whose primary purpose is to solicit or advertise another service or product.
- Content that is a non-differentiated version of another book.
- Content that is poorly translated.
- For ebooks, content that is best enjoyed printed: e.g., coloring books, notebooks, journals, activity books or books readers need to cut out.
- Books that could be easily mistaken for apps or other forms of digital content.
- Metadata that is confusingly similar to existing books, including misleading titles, authors, descriptions or covers, or that may cause confusion as to the format of the book.
- Books with quality issues in the content file(s) that render the content difficult to understand.
Derivative works
We do not accept summaries and other publications that rely too heavily on the existing copyrighted work of another author.
Questionable copyright
We do not accept books where the source material is impossible to trace or has been used by too many people and thus the copyright is questionable. Some examples would be joke collections, quotes, and proverbs.
Content About Public Figures
We do not accept books that:
- re-use speeches, interviews and quotes available online from living public figures
- use cover images with photos of living public figures without their written permission
- biographies that were not authorized or permitted by their subject if it is a living public figure
If you have the right to publish and distribute these texts/images and collect the resulting royalties, please contact our Support Team and send us the appropriate documentation.