Amazon hiding LGBT books

[julesjones]

Oh joy. There's been some suspicion over the last few days that Amazon has been hiding LGBT books (and possibly small press het erotica) from general view by removing the sales rankings so they don't show up unless you actively search for them by title or author. There'd been a lot of bland evasion when the authors asked them about it. Now a publisher has asked via a publisher-orientated back-channel, and been told that yes, it *is* very deliberate censorship of the "adult" titles to keep them out of general view. And in the case of LGBT titles, it's not just the smut that's been hidden. The YA titles are being suppressed from view as well.

More details via storm_grant's post here: http://storm-grant.livejournal.com/160240.html

I don't normally make a point of this, but in this case I think it's necessary: I'm Kinsey 0, i.e. very, *very* straight. I am, at least on the surface, one of the people Amazon thinks needs to be protected from exposure to That Sort Of Thing. Thanks, but I don't really need to be protected from the knowledge that YA gay literature exists, at least not while you're still happy to show me the raunchiest of mainstream bonkbusters and airport novels.

Comments

[gina-stormgrant.livejournal.com]

Great round-up post, here.
http://community.livejournal.com/meta_writer/11560.html
(http://community.livejournal.com/meta_writer/11560.html)
#amazonfail on Twitter is just rockin'!

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

Nice to know my irrational hatred of Amazon is entirely rational.

[julesjones]

Your hatred of Amazon has *always* been rational. They spammed you, and spamming is a perfectly good reason to hate a company.

My problem with providing Amazon links is that I use the affiliate programmes mostly to see which links people find useful -- and it turned out that people overwhelmingly picked Amazon, to the point where I regularly get click-throughs turn into actual sales, while I have never had a single sale through any of the alternatives. Which is why I continued to provide them even after previous episodes of being decidedly irritated by Amazon. But at this point I'm going to have to seriously think about dumping them. It's not just the censorship; they appear to be using this as a means of driving people to the Kindle editions of the books over the print editions, and I have Views on the would-be stranglehold over epublishing which is involved there.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I can see the point about explicit content - in which case, if you are over 18, you ought to be able to have the ability to opt-in and find everything; but teh gay isnot harmful. They're pandering only to a small group of people who find something offensive, and there are many more groups who find *other* things offensive. I find fundamentalist Christian literature suggesting I need to be saved offensive, for instance.

[julesjones]

There's something else mixed up in this -- it looks as if it's also a cover for driving people towards the Kindle editions rather than the print editions, which is a major issue of its own.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

There's a petition (http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/in-protest-at-amazons-new-adult-policy).