Guest post about Amazon.com

Last night, a concerned GLBT activist wrote and asked if we would post about Amazon. I told her that if she wrote a guest post about the subject, I would be happy to post it. Here it is.

UPDATE: Thanks, LindaH!

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Amazon.com is promoting homophobia

On April 10 Mark Probst, who writes gay fiction for young adults noticed that two newly released high profile books suddenly had no sales ranking on Amazon.com. The writers of gay fiction wondered what had happened. The next day, they discovered that hundreds of gay and lesbian books had lost their sales rankings. The authors couldn’t figure out why this had happened, so they started contacting Amazon. Amazon responded to Mr. Probst’s question saying.

“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.

Included in this “adult material” were titles like the highly erotic Heather Has Two Mommies, and When Your Spouse Comes Out. Also excluded are classic works such as Brokeback Mountain and The Price of Salt. In addition, none of these books can be found if you search Amazon from the all departments page. You have to go to the Books search page to find them. Meta_writer is compiling a list of titles that have had their rankings removed. Interestingly, you can find some of these titles on Amazon if they happen to be part of the Kindle database. After all, Amazon wants to sell those machines!

This is not limited to Amazon in the United States. England and Germany have also had the rankings removed, although according to this post in Germany only the English versions have been purged. The titles that are written in German still remain.

There are some campaigns that have been started to protest this. Smart Bitches Trashy Books has started a Google Bomb campaign. Hilangel has a list of protest sites here and there is an online petition.

Do not think, however, that Amazon simply put in a filter incorrectly. You can still put homosexuality as a subject on the start page and pull up titles. They are edifying titles like A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality; You Don’t Have to Be Gay: Hope and Freedom for Males Struggling With Homosexuality or for Those Who Know of Someone Who Is and Can Homosexuality Be Healed?

This is censorship by Amazon. I have already emailed them, Google bombed them and signed the petition. Tomorrow I intend to call Amazon to express my outrage at this policy.

This is an outrage and disgusting! The only way to fight this is to let Amazon know that we will not tolerate this. We need to fight this battle now, before Amazon decides other things are so “adult” that they have to be hidden from the public. Please help fight this now.

UPDATE 2: LindaH has received the Amazon form letter in response to her complaint. It follows:

Thank you for contacting Amazon.com.

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles – in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon’s main product search.
Many books have now been fixed and we’re in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

Thanks for contacting us. We hope to see you again soon.

Sincerely,

Customer Service Department
Amazon.com