Amazon.com has recently demonstrated the most ridiculous and the most offensive behavior that I've seen from a large company. Amazon has recently (as in the past few hours) started removing erotic books and GLBT books from their rankings and their definition of what constitutes "adult" seems very arbitrary. Books with heterosexual sexuality in graphic terms, but where the book is not released by an "erotic" publisher are being kept.
And no announcement was made. This has come to attention only because a handful of authors noticed their books had been stripped of their rankings. Amazon's only response is that:
"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."
This means books like Ruby Fruit Jungle, Bastard Out of Carolina and Running with Scissors have been stripped of their rankings while explict books like American Psycho, Wifey and mulitple Playboy photo books remain acceptable.
Read more: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2009/04/amazon-deranks-gayfriendly-books-the-twitterverse-notices.html
All of this crap and yet you can still buy adult toys on Amazon. ( http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=vibrator&x=13&y=23 )
And Adult Videos ( http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=adult+video )
3 comments:
This whole thing is so disgusting. My weekend has been filled with censorship garbage. I even blogged about a sad trip to he library Saturday, so when I saw this yesterday, I wanted to puke. I think Amazon.com is going to lose thousands of customers over this, as people are mad as hell, and not going to take it anymore. It is time to strip away these bigwigs and their lame attempts at censorship. You can see that it's a blatant lie when they are so choosy about what they'll rank.
I wrote about this on my blog too. POD publishers were the last groups to take an Amazon hit. They are now saying it was a glitch. What the...?
Sounds like they backed off that decision once EC got involved. Is it all resolved yet?
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