My friend
Zach points me to a scandal brewing on the interwebs. Apparently Amazon.com is censoring LGBT and sexually explicit books by removing them from their "ranking" system. Among the books affected are
Brokeback Mountain and
Lady Chatterley's Lover which is rather ironic. Anyway, here are links to three blog posts around the book-o-sphere (plus the first paragraphs) explaining the phenomenon:
An Open Letter to Amazon by Kassia Krozser from Booksquare
Dear Amazon, Happy Easter (or if it’s Monday morning, happy belated Easter!). It seems the Easter Bunny, while hopping down the bunny trail, left some rotten eggs all over the Amazon site while we were sleeping. Suddenly, many books lost their sales ranking and levels of searchability on the Amazon site.
It must be really tough being a stupid company on the Internet. Once you make a silly decision and it's out there, travelling via the Interwebs, you'll pay for it very dearly - and probably forever, as it would probably the first thing that customers discover about you on Google.
Dampening my snickering glee at being ranked among Movements and Periods is the news that Amazon seems to be stripping the sales figures and accompanying rankings from GLBTQ books, erotica, and romance novels, particularly those with what they term “adult content.”
In short: someone in Amazon has utter shit for brains.
Of course, if you want to see the action in real-time,
watch the #amazonfail hashtag on twitter. It will be interesting to see how the company responds to the firestorm. Anyway, just thought I'd keep my fellow bookworms informed!
So you're saying we woke up and it was 1955? What the hell is wrong with these people? Maybe they need to head on up to Vermont and see how the intellectual, open-minded, free-thinking people live.;-)
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