ditch your kindle

[adelaidesean]

Amazon has done a very bad thing by stripping GBLT titles from their sales ranks on the grounds of these titles being "too adult" to reflect the interests of their wider audience. WTF? When you start protecting society from books like Lady Chatterly's Lover and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Dead Girls The Dictionary of Homophobia: A Global History of Gay & Lesbian Experience you're really barking up the wrong frigging tree.

Astropolis seems to be exempt, but I believe that's more a reflection of my fame (or lack thereof) than the series' content. How long until someone notices that my books aren't just about big things blowing up against a starry backdrop and in fact contain transgender characters and homosexual sex and "Amazon rank" it? I want that sales figure to remain right where it is, thanks. It's so close to 666,666!

Sorry to give you two rants in a row, not to mention another petition, but I do think this is very important. Again, cancelling your account with this company may make more difference than a petition and flag-waving. Please consider it, for the sake of a sane world.

Comments

Slowly we move towards the 18th century...

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Petition signed.

[robinpen.livejournal.com]

Petition signed.

[amy-bai.livejournal.com]

signed. grrr.

[frogworth.livejournal.com]

Signed and tweeted.

[nyssa-p.livejournal.com]

Hah I just read a whole list of things banned (How to come out as gay or lesbian to your family, full frontal feminism, the lesbian parenting guide) to things that are accepted (The Complete A**hole's Guide To Handling Chicks, How To Be A Super Hot Woman, A Parent's Guide To Preventing Homosexuality. , Seduce Me! What Women Really Want, The Professional Bachelor Dating Guide: How To Exploit Her Inner Psycho. Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds)

Riiiiiighhhhhtttt, so feminism is bad too as well as homosexuality? -_- I don't link to Amazon anyway, but FFS!

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

I don't link to Amazon either (very rarely anyway) and this justifies that stance completely.

[wendy-waring.livejournal.com]

Hey Sean, you might want to have Amanda check any books she has listed in Amazon... My textbook "Gender Studies: Terms and Debates" has been de-ranked, and sadly, it's anything but titillating (at best it inspires an occasional swelling of indignation). There's no real rhyme or reason to the de-ranking. I suspect they've used user-generated tags to decide which ones to block....

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

That's a good suggestion. I'll tell Amanda to look into it. Maybe they're banishing thought as well as queerness!

[swordsmanscoke.livejournal.com]

Methinks it may be time to apologize to Amazon...

http://tinyurl.com/c4p8rp

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

I saw this somewhere else--
http://i.gizmodo.com/5210424/hacker-claims-he-shoved-amazon-into-the-closet-using-inappropriate-flag-exploit
--and I agree that it's an interesting suggestion. (A hack was the first thought that came to my mind, tbh, but why a right-wing hack? Wouldn't some lefty hacker have made such a move long before this?) Anyway, there's a lot of discussion on this out there. I reckon Making Light has the most likely explanation, but we'll see what comes out in the next few days when Amazon responds...

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/011173.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/04/13/amazon-goes-crazy-ba.html
http://io9.com/5209403/amazoncom-banishes-queer-sf-writers-to-a-null-dimension

[swordsmanscoke.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've been following the story on Gizmodo and io9 as well. I'm not in the Twitterverse (thankfully), so I've been waiting until the facts come out to really say anything about it. It seems like it's shaping up to be a hack, but I'll be interested to hear what the final word is on this. Thanks for the other links, by the way.

[stephen-dedman.livejournal.com]

Foreign Bodies also seems to have been exempted, despite being tagged as 'lesbian science fiction', but I'd be quite happy not to see the sales ranking :-)

[(Anonymous)]

As it turns out, the whole incident was not Amazon's fault. Good thing I didn't jump on the "Amazon is so lame" bandwagon.

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

I'd say it's not as simple as that. It does seem likely that it wasn't a malicious decision by management to damn anyone to the fiery pits of hell, but to leave your entire catalogue wide open to such a mistake is still pretty culpable.

[(Anonymous)]

What I would call simple was the immediate assumption that Amazon would deliberately do something like that. Would such a major online retailer take the risk of losing customers because the boss has become prudish and ultra-conservative? My sceptic self's answer is no. Mind you, I fully acknowledge the fact that Amazon has to take the blame for letting an idiot tamper with their data.