Amazon.com has decided to take books with "adult content" out of their site's ranking and/or search engine. In other words, you can't view how some works such as "Brokeback Mountain" by Annie Proulx, E.M. Forster, and Alex Beecroft's False Colours (which to my understanding has no adult content and is not erotica) are ranking on Amazon's site. Other books have been removed completely from the site's search engine (this includes the aforementioned False Colours). You can still Google these titles and their Amazon pages will come up, but if you try to search for them on Amazon's site, some of them won't.
So, what do these books all have in common? They contain GLBT content. Are they all graphic? No. Books such as The Advocate College Guide for GLBT Students - which is, as the title suggests, a guide for college-bound GLBTs - have been completely removed from the site's ranking system as well (it still comes up in a search, fortunately, but you just can't see how well it sells). Are any heterosexual erotica being removed from Amazon's search engine and ranking system? You'd think that the answer is "yes", but it's a big resounding NO. It seems that Amazon is essentially censoring GLBT books on their site.
Ironically, yaoi and BL has not been removed from either the search or rankings. Who knows how long this may last, though.
From creatingmyth's journal
A chronological round up of articles and journals blogging about it.
List of books so far censored.
Mark Probst's LJ entry in which he asks an Amazon sales rep about what's going on and gets a response.
Craig Seymour's blog entry on how this has been going on since February.
Petition against this obvious discrimination towards GLBT literature.
NEW INFO:
Amazon now claims that there is no new policy and that what happened was the result of a glitch. Bullshit.
If it was a glitch, I'd like to know how it affected ONLY the LGBT lit.
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