Amazon Removed Gay Books from Rankings

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by carrie

Signed the petition, Amazon don't need to censor us from anything. I have always believed we are able to decide for ourselves what to look at.

And as for children they cannot purchase from amazon they need their parents card so really the parents should be guiding their children in what they should be seeing.

The petition has gained almost 10'000 signatures in less than 2 days so it's annoyed a lot of people be it aimed at GLBT books or not.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/in-...w-adult-policy

Excellent points about the access of children to the site. This is a censorship issue at its very heart and should concern all people, whatever their sexual orientation. Besides all that, they de-ranked Stephen Fry! How very much dare they!

[Over]

It seems this "problem" only applies to the USA site, as in the UK and FR sites everything is "normal".

Amazon wants to make money, so I don't believe they would do something to lower their sales unless they had a good reason. So far, de-raking a book seems to be a matter of being able to search for it in the homepage, right?

So what?

Oh... That makes difficult for someone who is just casually browsing books to stumble in a G&L erotica book...

So what?

That is not censorship. Anyone willing to get the book he wants, can do so. FOr me, protesting this is the same as protesting agains't stores who don't stack playboy magazines next to the comic books and newspapers. Come on!


Now, if this is a sneaky step to something really worse, like real censorship, then I can understand all this revolt. But as it is, I see nothing wrong about shifting these books from the window to the shelves inside.

[carrie]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

Excellent points about the access of children to the site. This is a censorship issue at its very heart and should concern all people, whatever their sexual orientation. Besides all that, they de-ranked Stephen Fry! How very much dare they!

Indeed this is a censorship issue, it just so happens that the GLBT books have taken the brunt of the censorship. I'm sure other books out there have been striped of their rankings.

De-ranking Stephen Fry!!!?!?!!!!????!!!

They've also de-ranked John Barrowman's Bio! How that is classified as 'Adult' I have no idea? I think he mentions sex a couple of time but nothing is graphic.

Honestly I wonder how they decided what was classified as 'Adult' and what wasn't. Even if something is 'Adult' they shouldn't remove the sales after all it's selling for a reason and it's earnt that ranking.

On another note been watching the rate of signing on the petition and it's increasing fast!

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by Over

It seems this "problem" only applies to the USA site, as in the UK and FR sites everything is "normal".

Amazon wants to make money, so I don't believe they would do something to lower their sales unless they had a good reason. So far, de-raking a book seems to be a matter of being able to search for it in the homepage, right?

So what?

Oh... That makes difficult for someone who is just casually browsing books to stumble in a G&L erotica book...

So what?

That is not censorship. Anyone willing to get the book he wants, can do so. FOr me, protesting this is the same as protesting agains't stores who don't stack playboy magazines next to the comic books and newspapers. Come on!


Now, if this is a sneaky step to something really worse, like real censorship, then I can understand all this revolt. But as it is, I see nothing wrong about shifting these books from the window to the shelves inside.

The problem is that when they're de-ranked you won't have them on best-seller lists and other lists because they're now classed as 'adult', which is preposterous in the first instance because you have to be an 'adult' to own an Amazon account.

The books that were targeted were predominantly those that feature LGB&T tags in their descriptions. Whilst these, and it includes many classics such as E.M Foresters Maurice, have lost visibility, you can still get a butt plug or dildo recommendation in your list, or even Playboy and Girls Gone Wild. You don't see it as censorship when LGB&T books are excluded from the lists, but Girls Gone Wild is happily included?

[Gudy]

Originally Posted by Over

It seems this "problem" only applies to the USA site, as in the UK and FR sites everything is "normal".

It's not only the US site. Amazon.de suffered from the same problem but is now, from what I can see, mostly back to normal.

Originally Posted by Over

So far, de-raking a book seems to be a matter of being able to search for it in the homepage, right?

So what?

It's more than that. De-ranking a book makes it effectively invisible unless you're specifically searching for it in the "Books" category. No main search, no "customers who looked at this also looked at..." or "customers who bought this also bought...". Nothing.

Originally Posted by Over

FOr me, protesting this is the same as protesting agains't stores who don't stack playboy magazines next to the comic books and newspapers.

It's more like anyone who wants to buy these items won't find them on the shelves at all anymore, but now has to walk up to the desk and ask a clueless sales person for that specific item. Which, if it happened in a local bookstore with any material that isn't X-rated, would certainly cause me to question my continued patronage of said store.

[carrie]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

The books that were targeted were predominantly those that feature LGB&T tags in their descriptions. Whilst these, and it includes many classics such as E.M Foresters Maurice, have lost visibility, you can still get a butt plug or dildo recommendation in your list, or even Playboy and Girls Gone Wild. You don't see it as censorship when LGB&T books are excluded from the lists, but Girls Gone Wild is happily included?

They are all good examples.

What I find funny is peoples recommendations at Amazon are based upon what books they have been browsing so unless the person was looking at 'Adult' content in the first place they should not come across 'adult' content at all. OK some times you will accidently come across something when searching for something else but I doubt it would be hard core enough that the person should be totally offended.

[carrie]

Originally Posted by Gudy

It's more like anyone who wants to buy these items won't find them on the shelves at all anymore, but now has to walk up to the desk and ask a clueless sales person for that specific item. Which, if it happened in a local bookstore with any material that isn't X-rated, would certainly cause me to question my continued patronage of said store.

That is one of the most fantastic descriptions of what is happening

[catsittingstill]

Originally Posted by Over

So far, de-raking a book seems to be a matter of being able to search for it in the homepage, right?

So what?

Take a quick look at your books. Just one shelf-full will be fine. Textbooks required for courses don't count; move to a different shelf. How many of them did you purchase because you knew exactly what you wanted (what title, what author) before you ever laid eyes on the book, and were willing to search several stores to find it?

(When I try it, I get five books I probably would have found anyway, out of twenty-five books on that shelf.)

Those are the ones you might have been able to find on Amazon even if they had been deranked.

The rest of them--the ones you found because someone mentioned them and you casually checked them out at Amazon's main page, the ones you found because they were sitting out on the shelf and the title or cover caught your eye and you looked inside and liked what you saw, the ones you picked up because Amazon informed you that an author whose books you'd bought before had a new book out, the ones you bought because Amazon said "people who bought the book you're looking at also bought..." Forget it, you'd never have found them.

Now multiply that by every Amazon customer.

*That's* the problem.

[curtw]

Originally Posted by Liviu_5

There is a petition circulating around - whoever feels strongly about sign it. I did it on general principles - remember those words "yesterday they came for.."

They still apply today.

I don't want to come off as though I'm trivializing anyone's concerns, but I see this as just another symptom of booksellers wanting to game the system so that "serious" literature bubbles to the top of the bestseller lists.

So yes, yesterday they came for Harry Potter, and the industry moved "children's books" off the listing. Today it's "trashy romances" (both straight and gay). But it's not censorship, it's just a fraudulent attempt to make Americans appear to be better-read than they actually are.

[stannyc]

They've even de-listed Virginia Woolf's Orlando, a book with NO gay characaters and NO sex. Anais Nin's works are de-listed, but not Henry Miller's. This is another part of why Amazon's policy is so wrong. It's indiscriminate.

[montsnmags]

The "T" in GLBT stand for "Transgender" which would quite satisfactorily cover Orlando, so perhaps that is why.

[hogleg]

It's Amazon's store. They can run it how they want to. It's Amazon's kindle, so that argument doesn't hold water either. Maybe if they actively stopped you from putting it on there, I'd start to worry. You should have known that when electronic media finally made it mainstream, this would happen. The same thing happened when swedish video game developers started selling porn for the Atari.

Telling them what they have to sell is akin to telling them what they can not sell. If you don't like their business model, don't patronize them. It really is that simple. Don't get all up in arms about it, because I bet half of you have books you wouldn't show your mothers. I couldn't care less if you have them, but I'm not going to insist you can't hide them.

[Sparrow]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I'm intrigued: how does "The Picture of Dorian Gray" come to be classified as a "Gay and Lesbian" book?

It is fairly homoerotic isn't it?

I was more wondering about 'Lady Chatterly's Lover'.

[Andurian]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I'm intrigued: how does "The Picture of Dorian Gray" come to be classified as a "Gay and Lesbian" book?

Oscar Wilde was homosexual and jailed for it.

Doesn't affect the content, of course, but that matters for some people - some GLBT people would buy the book because of that, some Fundamentalist people would refuse to because of that.

[carrie]

Some one has done an interesting search and came up with this.

It appears that all the content that was filtered out had either “gay”, ”lesbian”, ”transgender”, “erotic” or “sex” metadata categories. Playboy Centerfold books were categorized as “nude” and “erotic photography”, both categories that apparently weren’t included in the filter.

Full Article