It’s come to my attention that a number of gay authors found that the sales ranks had been removed from their books at amazon.com, preventing them from showing up on the best-seller lists and in certain searches.
I already far preferred to shop from independent bookstores, especially for LGBT items, but Amazon isn’t getting another dime of this queer’s money until they reverse this idiotic policy.
Wow. If this is true, it’s horrifying. I got pissed enough when a local lesbian-owned bookstore hid Jeanette Winterson’s books in the LGBT fiction shelves instead of putting them out with the rest of the fiction; this is so much worse.
The links only go to livejournals, though; I’d like to see independent verification.
Why can’t they combine all ranks of a book? Or is it supposed to be significant to a book’s popularity whether it’s purchased most often in hardcover, trade, paperback, audiobook, or Kindle?
One of the things that was pointed out is that it seems to be very inconsistent for each book, over various editions. And it keeps vaccilating: when I looked up OANTOF I found one with a page rank, but now neitherLeft Hand’s nor Ninja’s links display one.
ETA: and now it seems to be back in Ninja’s link. Still gone in Left Hand’s, though. Weird.
I was able to find sales rankings for Maurice and Stone Butch Blues too. Not all version of the books have sales rankings. Not sure why some versions do and some don’t, or if this was an oversight on the part of the censorship effort, or what.
A website named after a group of women who took on traditional male roles is now discriminating against various who don’t take on conservative gender roles.
I wonder if they’re gonna delist their whole website.
My guess is that they’re trying to get rid of "adult’ products from generic listings, but that whoever wrote their algorithms for doing so is completely incompetent and probably a bit of a heterosexist if not outright homophobe. The fact that it’s changing so much–on an Easter, no less-suggests that someone realizes this is unacceptable and is fiddling with the algorithm now to fix it.
If these books remain delisted or weirdly listed by, say, next Friday, I’ll be a lot more irritated. Right now it looks like a comedy of errors, coupled with one or two morons.
Smart Bitches is on the case, with an effort to Google Bomb Amazon. They’ve created a new definition for Amazon Rank.
What the hell are they [Amazon] thinking? I know nothing of computers and hacking, but this decision to selectively strip sales ranks seems too absolutely bone-headed to have been made by the people who run Amazon. Maybe they got hacked or something?
Come on, LHoD, you aren’t normally given to such histrionics. Someone climbing in your bedroom window at night, wearing a hockey mask and wielding a chainsaw, is horrifying. This is a situation that is surprising and unfair, and to some, outrageous, but it hardly rises to the level of horror.
My initial guess would be that maybe they just have an automatic acceptance if someone complains - if anyone sends in a complaint, it’s simply taken off the rankings, which would explain to an extent the odd selection.
You’re wrong. I’d far rather be tortured to death by a chainsaw wielding maniac that live in a world in which Amazon removes the rankings from LGBT books. If you wouldn’t, that just proves what a bigot you are. And, like all bigots, totally devoid of an ability to recognize deliberate hyperbole or humor. Which I find horrifying.
I dunno. That’s possible, but I have a hard time believing Oranges are not the only fruit would warrant a complaint. It’s a pretty innocuous book, IIRC.
I did see some speculation that it’s a deliberate attack on LGBT books by an outside agency using Amazon’s complaint mechanism (which I’m not familiar with), which would explain the spotty coverage. That would be one possible explanation as to why this is going on over Easter weekend: to maximize corporate response time.
If that’s so, I’m going to assume that there will be an extremely embarrassed and contrite press release by Tuesday at the latest, followed by an immediate undo and complete overhaul of this putative “adult” ranking (along the lines of Google Safe Search – although if they insist on allowing the likes of Heather Has Two Mommies and Hello, Cruel World to go under “adult,” stay tuned for Amazon!Fail Part Deux.)
Someone else pointed out that the Kindle versions of these same books are not generally being affected. What that seems to be causing is that a search for the title may result in the Kindle version appearing first, followed by a half-dozen listings of flotsam, and then maybe the paper version at the end. It took me a couple of tries to find the listing for Hello, Cruel World – a search for “hello cruel world” started with the Kindle edition, then went through seven or eight unrelated items, and concluded with two out-of-print versions. I had to find the above version by clicking on the author name. It certainly seems that sales rank affects search results, which I find especially scary.
FWIW, a search for “Homosexuality” currently gives as its first result A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. Barf.