The web cries out in outrage: Amazon hiding teh gay literature under the rug.

(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.

Heads up--Amazonfail may be a troll attack

There is an interesting theory put forth here, that the de-ranking at Amazon may result from some fundy nutgroup flagging anything with teh gay as "adult content" or "offensive content" or something.  If they had enough people, working in a coordinated way, they might be able to trigger some sort of automatic unranking of books they target.

A weekend that is also a major holiday for two religions would be a great time to do this, because the people minding the store are likely to be the ones without seniority (and therefore experience) and thus will take longer to notice something wrong and may not be able to set it right themselves.

So...

Maybe it is Amazon's fail, in which case I stand ready to trim their ears closer to their heads with a dull spoon (metaphorically speaking).  But maybe it's some fundy nuts trying to turn a liberal group (people who want fair treatment for gays) against a relatively liberal company.

So I think I'm going to sit back and wait a while before doing anything more.  Life is short--but not so short I can't give them until the end of Monday to make some progress on setting things right.