Bonding with Fifty Shades. Erotica and literature

Bonding with Fifty Shades, article.

It seems that the kinky Fifty Shades of Grey book is a hit so huge that it's having effects outside the book business. Interesting, that does not happen often. One phenom like that was Apple's multi-colored iMacs in the late nineties, for a while there, that design inspired so much copycatting... I even saw bottles of hair products shaped like the circular iMac mouse, in five colors!

But it's claimed that Fifty Shades is selling so much that it's pulling up not just the whole book market, but neighboring markets too! Huh?
I would look into it, except I can't imagine that the book itself will be anything but trivial. While I don't mind erotica, I don't think I've come across any which was anything but trivial in artistic terms. It has to be, because good art gets in the way of the titillation, and vice versa. You can't think important thoughts or enjoy fine nuances at the same time as trying to work up a froth.

Update:
I did now manage to glance at a couple of reviews, though, they confirmed my hunch. Amazon's site says that:
“The books are not well written, incredibly repetitive, there is little character development, and the sex scenes are, well, vanilla.”
sailorgirl27  |  1,599 reviewers made a similar statement
Sample:
About half way through the book, I looked up the author to see if she was a teenager. I really did because the characters are out of a 16 year old's fantasy. The main male character is a billionaire (not a millionaire but a billionaire) who speaks fluent French, is basically a concert level pianist, is a fully trained pilot, is athletic, drop dead gorgeous, tall, built perfectly with an enormous penis, and the best lover on the planet. In addition, he's not only self made but is using his money to combat world hunger. Oh yeah, and all of this at the ripe old age of 26! And on top of that, he's never working. Every second is spent having sex or texting and emailing the female character. His billions seem to have just come about by magic. It seriously feels like 2 teenage girls got together and decided to create their "dream man" and came up with Christian Grey.

Yes, that is one of the things about erotica: the characters are almost always cardboard.  The dom is always mature, but very handsome, fits, and rich. And ice cold.

But all that doesn't matter much, most of TV is trash, and yet some of it is very good. I think it's a good thing that an erotic novel has hit mainstream hard. It's one of those things we need to get out of the Victorian shame which still slops around our angles.

If you wonder what "vanilla" means here, well, it's like you would think. It means normal sex, not kinky or inventive.
See, when I moved to the UK a decade ago, entertainment was scarce, so I walked into a big book store in the middle of town (Edinburgh at the time), and bought half a dozen erotic novels pretty much at random. And it turned out that every single one of them was S/M based. And every one I have found since. It seems this whole country is seeped in it. So I had to learn something about it!