Commercial importation of pornographic publications is punishable by fines or jail terms.
Mark Cenite, a media law expert at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, said the delisting move “is more of a housecleaning exercise than a policy shift or significant liberalisation”.
“Many of the titles are no longer in print, or no longer in demand,” he said.
“High speed Internet access is everywhere in Singapore, and the authorities exercise a light hand in regulation of online content, blocking only a symbolic list of 100 sites. So this list of publications was also mostly a symbolic ban, and a historical artefact,” he told AFP.
But Neil Humphreys, a commentator for Yahoo! Singapore, ridiculed the remaining prohibition list.
“Fanny Hill is an erotic novel set in London. Fanny Hill was published in 1748,” he wrote. “So, about 250 years from now, we can look forward to Playboy being taken off the banned list.”
Playboy announced in October that it will stop publishing nude photos in its iconic magazine for men from March 2016, in the face of rampant online pornography.
