Amazon Rank

Amazon Rank

Amazon.com's seen fit to exclude books it deems "adult" from "some searches and best seller lists", as well as their sales ranks. In this case, "adult" seems to include pretty much anything prominently featuring queer content (including young adult novels), but apparently doesn't include books featuring pictures of Playboy Playmates or dog-fighting.

To add insult to injury, Amazon seems to have done this without mentioning it to anyone outside the company in advance. This weekend a bunch of authors discovered their work had been rendered invisible to Amazon customers for no good reason. At least, I'm assuming there's no good reason, on the grounds that: 1) the reason Amazon's been giving is ill-thought out, to put it incredibly charitably, and 2) if there was a good reason, it would've been done years ago.

I've never actually purchased a book through Amazon (up till today primarily because they didn't accept Paypal, at least as far as I can tell), so the only effective action I personally can really take on this is spreading the word and signing and linking to a petition objecting to the situation, and "google-bombing" Amazon with the Amazon Rank link at the top of this post. All of which I've now done, and encourage anyone reading to do as well.

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