AMAZON.COM IS NO PLACE FOR ADULTS

[defrog]

I know I mentioned this at the end of the previous post, but this deserves some extra attention, since the initial story has expanded well beyond the Violet Blue post where I first saw it.

THE STORY SO FAR: Some time over the last few days, Amazon.com apparently began delisting “adult” books from their sales rankings, which ensures they don't pop up in search results and best-seller lists. Consequently, it’s knocking an awful lot of LGBT titles off its search results and best-seller lists.

Here’s what else it also affects so far according to the LA Times:

Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs
Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 by Michel Foucault
Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison (2005 Plume edition)
Little Birds: Erotica by Anais Nin
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominque Bauby (1997 Knopf edition)
Maurice by E.M. Forster (2005 W.W. Norton edition)
Becoming a Man by Paul Monette, which won the 1992 National Book Award.

Brokeback Mountain was also reportedly off the rankings, though it now seems to be back on.

At the moment, it's not really clear just what's going on. When author Mark R. Probst noticed that hundreds of LGBT titles had been deranked, he wrote Amazon to explain themselves and they said: "In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature."

Several thousand angry Twitters later, Amazon is now saying it's a glitch.

Uh huh.

So which is it? Policy or glitch? Case precedent leans towards "policy", if only because Amazon.com ran into a similar, less-publicized problem two months ago when it deranked a number of memoirs by gay strippers and porn stars while leaving similar books by Cody Diablo and Jenna Jameson on the ranking list. And for all we know, the "glitch" could simply be that the policy is accidentally deranking hetero titles.

It's possible there's a rational explanation for all this, if only because the people at Amazon strike me as reasonably bright sparks more often than not. It's hard to imagine they would make a business decision this stupid. What bookseller in his/her right mind would make it HARDER for long-tail customers to find something they want to pay for, much less do so in a way that looks as though it's engaging in censorship, which would not only anger a decent chunk of their customer base, but also the authors and publishers whose books they sell?

Either way, until Amazon can get its story straight, as of now I am boycotting all further purchases on Amazon.com. If it's a glitch, fix it. If it's a policy (even if the "policy" is from some crazed middle manager acting unilaterally), rescind it. The fact that I can still buy deranked books on Amazon is irrelevant. So is the question of whether the alleged policy targets LGBT titles over hetero titles. I do not want Amazon or anyone else filtering my search results for my own protection. I do not need protecting from Teh Fuckingz.

And I'd better not hear that this is all because some morality pressure group complained that their kid bought a Dan Savage book or something.

MEGA FAIL,

This is dF

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