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catsittingstill(Nicked from filkertom)
Amazon has apparently decided to strip the rankings from various romance and young adult novels with gay relationships or gay protagonists. The result is that these novels don't show up when you go to the main web page and type their titles into the search box. If I understand correctly, if you know exactly what you want, and are persistent, you can find them by going to the correct category (romance, gay erotica, whatever) and trying from there.
However most people, I expect, go to the main web page, type in title or author, and if the book in question doesn't show up in the search results, they assume it's not there.
Way to drive down sales, guys.
Weirdly enough, though some lesbian works have been Amazon ranked, it seems to have concentrated on gay (in the sense of male/male) works.
And another weird thing: some of the Kindle books are still showing up in the searches, even as the paper books are not.
I don't get it. Does Amazon hate gays enough to be willing to lose business in order to make gays harder to find? But why just gays and not lesbians? Has some homophobic organized group been pressuring Amazon? Wouldn't the homophobic organized group hate lesbians too? And why leave the Kindle books up? Maybe the homophobic organized group are luddites who won't touch Kindles?
Whatever it is, I'm not impressed.
[later edit] I haven't had my reading material chosen for me since I was too young to walk to the library by myself. I don't need or want Amazon to nanny me now.
Amazon has apparently decided to strip the rankings from various romance and young adult novels with gay relationships or gay protagonists. The result is that these novels don't show up when you go to the main web page and type their titles into the search box. If I understand correctly, if you know exactly what you want, and are persistent, you can find them by going to the correct category (romance, gay erotica, whatever) and trying from there.
However most people, I expect, go to the main web page, type in title or author, and if the book in question doesn't show up in the search results, they assume it's not there.
Way to drive down sales, guys.
Weirdly enough, though some lesbian works have been Amazon ranked, it seems to have concentrated on gay (in the sense of male/male) works.
And another weird thing: some of the Kindle books are still showing up in the searches, even as the paper books are not.
I don't get it. Does Amazon hate gays enough to be willing to lose business in order to make gays harder to find? But why just gays and not lesbians? Has some homophobic organized group been pressuring Amazon? Wouldn't the homophobic organized group hate lesbians too? And why leave the Kindle books up? Maybe the homophobic organized group are luddites who won't touch Kindles?
Whatever it is, I'm not impressed.
[later edit] I haven't had my reading material chosen for me since I was too young to walk to the library by myself. I don't need or want Amazon to nanny me now.
