Hello Peoples

Ready for a rant? Cause this is going to be a good one.

Apparently, mega bookseller Amazon.com has taken it upon themselves to become the morality police of readers everywhere. They have removed from the front page results and sales rankings any book that is 'adult.' Any book with GLBT content, erotic content, a number of romances, have been deranked.*

By removing rank, Amazon has effectively removed those deranked books from their website. They are still technically being sold, but they will not appear on any search that is not category specific. And who is going to search in "Books" when "All Merchandise" came back with nothing?

But you will notice that Play Boy, group incest manga, and other wonderfully non-adult books are still ranked and featured. On the other hand, Young Adult books that feature GLBT themes are apparently too scary for people and have been removed.

What. The. Fuck.

While I cannot articulate my rage quite as well as the good people of DearAuthor.com [link] I can fully sympathize.

This is discrimination, pure and simple. There is absolutely no business-relevant reason to make this decision. Romance and erotica are really the only genres that are making money hand over fist in this recession, and Amazon decides to censor its results to exclude them? What more, it is apparently eliminating anything and everything that was tagged "gay" because non-fiction works with GLBT themes have also been deranked.

The censorship that has been happening recently is going to give me a fucking seizure...

And perhaps I smell a lawsuit in the future? That would be great.

Here is a list, btw, that Meta Writer is compiling of all the books that are being deranked: [link]

But in the meantime, for those who are interested, there are a few things you can do.

Sign the petition protesting Amazon's fucking ridiculous actions here. It takes all of thirty seconds, so go do it! [link]

Participate in the SmartBitchesTrashyBooks.com Google-bombing of Amazon. Here is an explanation: [link] And here is Amazon Rank Go to the dA FAQ on HTML formatting to find out how to do it on dA.

Once the Urban Dictionary definition of Amazon Rank goes up, go give it some positive reviews. Thumbs up for Amazon Rank! I'll update to let people know when that goes through and is available for thumb upping.

Directly contact Amazon Customer Service at ecr@amazon.com or 1-800-201-7575. DearAuthor featured a nice, angry template email.

Go yell at this guy: [link] Use full sentences and well-formed ideas, though! We dont want to give him more ammo. He is clearly an ass.


*Deranked refers to the sales rankings that Amazon tracks. If you search directly from the front page of Amazon, your results are given back in terms of highest to lowest sales rank.

Amazon Rank