Amazon Hides LGBT Books

[Plum]

Posted: 4/12/09 at 6:43pm

Wow, I can't believe this hasn't made the boards already. Amazon has apparently started removing the sales ranks from books with any remotely LGBT themes, saying it's because they're too "adult". Books affected include such well-known porn as Brokeback Mountain, Maurice, Running With Scissors, and Moab is My Washpot. Many of the books affected have also been removed from Amazon's search feature - except for the Kindle editions, funnily enough.

So basically, the Internet's predominant bookseller is trying to make books with LGBT authors, characters, and themes invisible by removing them from their rankings and search engine. Search for "homosexuality" on Amazon right now to see the effects. The hilarious part is they probably thought they were being sneaky about it.

If you'd like to fight the BS, here's some Amazon contact info they'd probably prefer remain little-known. Oh well!

1-800-201-7575 (if you live in the U.S.)

1-866-216-1072

[e-mail]

Jeffrey Bezos
1200 12th Avenue South
Seattle
Washington 98144-2734
United States
Phone: [phone]
Fax: [phone]

There's more info in the LJ community I linked below, or you can search #amazonfail on Twitter.









List of books affected so far Updated On: 4/12/09 at 06:43 PM

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/12/09 at 7:07pm

This kind of bigotry makes me furious.

[papalovesmambo]

Posted: 4/12/09 at 7:11pm

not to diminish what is happening, but this thread title kinda implies something else.

[PiraguaGuy2]

Posted: 4/12/09 at 7:13pm

Disgusting.

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 4/12/09 at 7:16pm

Shrug. Gay people skeeve this country out. Now more than ever, it seems.

[Plum]

Posted: 4/12/09 at 7:16pm

"deranks" didn't seem to have quite the same ring to it, papalovesmambo. I'll change it if you really think it's misleading, though.

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 4/12/09 at 7:21pm

Ghettoizes?

Marginalizes?

[Q]

Posted: 4/12/09 at 7:24pm

Expecially infuriating to me is that one of the primary statements concerning the closure of gay bookstores is that our writing is now so available through 'mainstream' souces such as this.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/12/09 at 7:28pm

Hi,
I signed the petition "In protest at Amazon's new "adult" policy". I'm asking you to sign this petition to help us reach our goal of 10,000 signatures. I care deeply about this cause, and I hope you will support our efforts.
Sign the petition here

[Plum]

Posted: 4/12/09 at 7:29pm

By the way, this is what the search results for 'homosexuality' look like now.

It isn't just fiction being affected - scholarly works like Foucault's writings on sexuality are being delisted, too, leaving only books on how you can keep your kid from being gay. Nice.


Screencap Updated On: 4/12/09 at 07:29 PM

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 4/12/09 at 8:03pm

Jesus.

[nmartin]

Posted: 4/12/09 at 9:58pm

What are you talking about? I just used the search feature for Maurice and Brokeback Mountain, and both books came up immediately.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/12/09 at 10:38pm

Michelangelo Signorile explains what happened:

Sunday, April 12, 2009
Amazon: It was a "Glitch"

Lots of questions remain. How could there be "glitch" that cuts out only LGBT content? And why did some authors report this happening from as early as February?

Amazon now says the removal of sales rankings for LGBT books was a all an innocent mistake, it was a "glitch"and that it will be corrected:

A groundswell of outrage, concern and confusion sprang up over the weekend, largely via Twitter, in response to what authors and others believed was a decision by Amazon to remove adult titles from its sales ranking. On Sunday evening, however, an Amazon spokesperson said that a glitch had occurred in its sales ranking feature that was in the process of being fixed. The spokesperson added that there was no new adult policy.


Do you buy it?
The Gist: Amazon: It was a "Glitch"

[Plum]

Posted: 4/12/09 at 10:57pm

nmartin, different books got different treatment. Sometimes only one edition of a book got removed, sometimes it was deranked (look to see if it has a sales ranking) but not removed from the search. The targeting seems to have been through the book tags - almost anything with a gay & lesbian subject tag was suspect to deranking, which is why the results were so arbitrary and bizarre.

If you want an example of a book whose regular listing disappeared from search results, try searching for Heather Has Two Mommies on Amazon and then on Barnes and Noble.

(That's what I mean by "arbitrary", BTW. A children's book gets removed for being too "adult", but Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, with its fairly explicit gay and straight sex scenes, doesn't? Foucault's History of Sexuality Vol. 1 is gone, but not the second or third volumes? This was clumsy as well as bigoted.) Updated On: 4/12/09 at 10:57 PM

[suzycat]

Posted: 4/12/09 at 11:00pm

Those of us in the publishing community have been going bananas about this all day on Twitter. It's ridiculous - there's no way in hell it was a glitch. Find the discussion on Twitter at http://search.twitter.com/search?q=amazonfail

Here are a few sites that explain what's going down:

http://booksquare.com/open-letter-to-amazon-regarding-recent-policy-changes/

http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2009/04/12/amazon-rank/

Try searching for "homosexuality" at Amazon. You get a bunch of books about how to prevent it. Disgusting.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/12/09 at 11:12pm

This guy thinks it was an Internet troll attack.
On Amazon Failure, Meta-Trolls, and Bantown

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 4/12/09 at 11:18pm

Yeah, I tried to figure out what Bantown was and I felt about 90 years old.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/12/09 at 11:25pm

Think: Jose and a Gang of Terrorist Sock Puppets

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 4/12/09 at 11:33pm

It doesn't add up. It's been said to have been going on since February. Also, why would Amazon send a response like that?

Is this what they mean by metalulz?

[noplain]

Posted: 4/13/09 at 12:01am

Angels In America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes is there and ranked http://www.amazon.com/Angels-America-Millennium-Approaches-Perestroika/dp/1559362316/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239595330&sr=1-1

But Angels In America, Part One: Millennium Approaches has been unranked http://www.amazon.com/Angels-America-Part-One-Millennium/dp/1559360615/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239595330&sr=1-2

This edition, ranked http://www.amazon.com/Angels-America-Tony-Kushner/dp/1854599828/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239595330&sr=1-3

This edition of part two, unranked http://www.amazon.com/Angels-America-Part-Two-Perestroika/dp/1559360739/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239595330&sr=1-4

[ColorTheHours048]

Posted: 4/13/09 at 12:05am

I think this is all just a glitch.

[Plum]

Posted: 4/13/09 at 12:06am

I think the Bantown argument has some merit. What those trolls do is take advantage of weaknesses already inherent in the way these big websites do business (I was around for the Strikethrough that author is talking about and it was pretty epic). The weakness in this case, I guess, was Amazon's system of marking off and hiding "objectionable" literature - it was weak because it was too easy to make it target non-objectionable books.

So these trolls set some fundie group on Amazon like attack dogs on a holiday weekend, when it's likely that experienced response staff would be away, and sure enough, Amazon responded stupidly.

I think it's a good theory because LiveJournal has had flareups like Strikethrough two Memorial Day weekends in a row. That's not pure coincidence; that's trolling.

Or, of course, it could just have been someone in middle management in Amazon getting a bee in their bonnet about those awful gays and their nasty gay books. Who knows? It's the holiday weekend thing that makes me think the Bantown idea has merit.

ColortheHours, with respect, the evidence doesn't point that way at all. If it was a software glitch, Amazon wouldn't be sending letters to authors who were objecting to being deranked saying that their books were too "adult". They'd be sending letters saying, "Oops, sorry; our software is wonky." Updated On: 4/13/09 at 12:06 AM

[orangeskittles]

Posted: 4/13/09 at 1:24am

To be fair, if you search for "gay", the first result is the movie The Pool and the second is The Gay Man's Kama Sutra, and The Joy of Gay Sex shortly after (chintzy gay pride jewelry comes up in between). The sales rankings might have been intentional on their part, but the search issue could have just been the result of a google bomb.

[Plum]

Posted: 4/13/09 at 2:51am

A Google bomb? Amazon doesn't use Google for its internal search so far as I know, and even if it did, Google bombs don't work that way at all. (In fact, a Google bomb was made in response to this controversy. If you search for the terms amazon rank you'll see.)

Google bombs work like this:

You pick out your target search terms - in this case, 'amazon rank'. Normally, the first Google search results for 'amazon rank' are pages describing Amazon's ranking system.

Then, you pick out what you want the new top search result to be. In this case, the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books website created a page (linked below) with their own, novel definition of what 'amazon rank' means.

Finally, you advertise the bomb and ask people to spread it. People all over the web read the Smart Bitches page, went back to their own blogs, and created links to the target page with the title 'amazon rank'. They did so repeatedly, and asked others to do the same, and in the space of a few hours the top Google result for 'amazon rank' became the Smart Bitches page. I've contributed a tiny bit to the bomb with my link below.

It works by taking advantage of how Google's search indexing works. And it has nothing to do with what happened to Amazon's search results, which was an inside job. Google bombs can't make tens (if not hundreds) of LGBT-related titles disappear from Amazon's search engine; they just don't work that way.

I'm not saying I'll boycott Amazon (yet), or that I think this is an expression of deliberate company-wide policy. But I need better proof that it wasn't than the BS "software glitch" excuse. I'm leaning against the Bantown theory now that people are dissecting the mechanics of it, and my instinct is still that this was middle-management idiocy combined with poor customer relations, but Amazon needs to show that they give a crap and understand that this is bad.



Amazon rank Updated On: 4/13/09 at 02:51 AM

[orangeskittles]

Posted: 4/13/09 at 3:14am

Yes, but censorship doesn't explain why the "homosexuality" search term is affected, but not "gay".

Is this image less "adult" than Heather Has Two Mommies?
The Pool

Updated On: 4/13/09 at 03:14 AM