Apr 13, 2009 12:40 PM
11,145
Enter your username and password.
Amazon's now trying to explain that the blacklisting of LGBT books as "adult" titles that aren't ranked or even searchable was just a "glitch" in its sales rankings. Amazon is not a good liar.
Let's look at the evidence! When Amazon Advantage member and publish Mark Probst asked Amazon why sales rankings vanished from two high profile gay romance books—among hundreds of other gay titles—Amazon Member Services explained:
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.
HMMM.
Author Craig Seymour documents the timeline by which his memoir All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, D.C. was stripped of its sales ranking and branded an adult title over the course of the month of February—two months before the supposed glitch—even though Diablo Cody's own stripper memoir's rankings stayed just peachy.
So, expect their glitch explanation to become even more elaborate and ridiculous (maybe it was Conficker!!!!), since it really has to cover a lot of ground. And like Ryan says at Valleygawker, "The company will no doubt try to do that without reminding its homophobic customers that it is selling hot man-on-man and woman-on-woman and whoever-on-whoever purple prose for gays to read and do lord knows what else at the same time." [Gawker,
Send an email to matt buchanan, the author of this post, at matt@gizmodo.com.
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
Start a new discussion