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Twitter's been exploding for a day or so over #AmazonFail. Basically starting on Easter Sunday a ton of Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual books started getting labeled as adult, and thus taken off of certain searches, and had their rank removed as well. At first Amazon simply ignored this, then their second response that it was a glitch. This has been countered by some pointing out that books such as "A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality" manages to stay on while books that cover the History of Gay Rights have gone away.
Some have put forth a theory that this was trollers, all complaining at once (conviently on Easter so that Amazon couldn't fully respond) in order to get some attention or just be dicks. It's a bit hazy right now, though my money is on Amazon trying to quietly appease some conservative complaints. -
The latest word is that it looks like it's all about sexual content (regardless of hetero- or homo-), and how a book is classified. If a book has a "sexuality" tag, then it gets removed from the rankings. How a book is tagged has raised a bunch of questions as well, as different VERSIONS of the same book are classified differently. For example, the original hardcover release of a book might be "lifestyles", but the softcover might be "sexuality", meaning one version keeps the rank, and the other goes away.
One article I read quoted a tweet that said that The Anarchist's Cookbook is still ranked, but The Joy of Sex isn't, so Amazon would rather you make napalm than get laid.
Regarding the question of GLB books being the only ones taken off, that is incorrect, but they DO seem to be given the "sexuality" tag more often than books with heterosexual themes, and therefore being removed at a disproportionate rate.
EDIT - OK, so *NOW* the latest word is that it was a coder for Amazon France that equated "adult" (the term they use for porn) with "erotic". So regardless of what the book actually was, if it was tagged as an adult book, it got filtered out. And because the tags used on any one Amazon site get pushed through to the others, it became a store-wide issue. @FridgeBuzzNow posted the link on Twitter to the seattlepi.com article:
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- Sean April 2009