Happy Easter! Boycott Amazon!

[starlady]

Basically, Amazon.com has decided that homosexual love and/or sex scenes in general (including classic texts such as Lady Chatterley's Lover and Brokeback Mountain) pose a danger to its customer base (while books such as Mein Kampf and how-to guides on dogfighting are A-OK!) and stripped them from its search rankings system.

More info, including a link to an online petition and instructions on how to Google-bomb the phrase "Amazon rank." 

Amazon Rank.

And an open letter that sums the situation up nicely (thanks, @sashafrerejones!). Also, Amazon's CTO is @werner. Go forth and share your opinion with him, ye Twitter-ers! This rant also includes Amazon's customer service number (800-201-7575), as well as the numbers of its board of directors.

ETA: The LA Times' book blog weighs in, pointing out that the ability to disappear books that offend is akin to a Soviet-ization of intellectual life.

ETA2: Here's a theory that it's a Bantown-style meta-trolling...that, as faunaana points out in the comments, has been going on since February. Meanwhile, Amazon claims it's a glitch rather than policy. Sure.

ETA3: Amazonfail: the lolcat.

Well, I'm going to bed.

Comments

[nokiirat.livejournal.com]

boo hiss. seems very unlike them. thought amazon was a liberal sort of company.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's very disappointing (also, I wonder if this is a global policy: .jp would have to delist virtually all the manga in Japan).

[(Anonymous)]

What I really don't understand is how they felt this would be helpful to themselves.

Rankings for me are entirely useless...but blocking search results? Why in the world would you stock a product and then refuse to let customers know you have?

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

It looks like it's being implemented by a very poorly written search algorithm that's responsible for the breadth and wild inconsistency of the de-listing (http://katallen.livejournal.com/282977.html), but it was clearly intentional (I love those smug form letters), and you're right, it's a good question as to how anyone thought this was a good idea in any way.