Amazon.com's Epic Fail

by Michael Jones · 2009-04-13 05:44:00 UTC
Topics:

amazon.com

It takes a major, major mistake to create all sorts of news over Easter weekend.  Exhibit #1: Amazon.com, and their colossal botch of deleting the sales rank of gay and lesbian books, labeling them as "adult" content and removing them from search rankings.

Amazon.com, meet Stonewall 2.0.  LGBT rights bloggers - led by Mark Probst - managed to make this the story of the weekend, even surpassing the news that Barack Obama got a dog.

Thousands of LGBT rights supporters have emailed Amazon.com to ask why they suddenly removed the sales rankings from such harmless LGBT books as Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle, and a number of other PG-rated books.  In a public relations email tantamount to nothing more than corporate spin, an Amazon.com official explained the removal of nearly all things LGBT with the following statement:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Wow.  Someone buy Amazon.com a dictionary, and ask them to look up the words "adult" and "erotica."  Because the books they're banning are about as far away from "erotica" as a John Grisham novel.

Amazon.com is now saying that the whole removal of LGBT books was a big flub, and that they're working on remedying the problem.  That explanation is just not good enough for America's largest online retailer.  Especially when books that talk about how to cure and prevent homosexuality are still allowed to climb up the best sellers list.

We've created an action over here at change.org that allows you to email your thoughts directly to Amazon.com's CEO, Jeff Bezos. Please, tell Amazon.com to stop discriminating against LGBT books, and ask them to make public the set of guidelines for how books are classified on the site.  Because right now, it appears that a homophobe with an axe to grind is running the filtering system over there.

Michael Jones is a Change.org Editor. He has worked in the field of human rights communications for a decade, most recently for Harvard Law School.

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