Amazon.com found itself at the center of a Web outcry over the weekend when word spread that the on-line sales company had abruptly de-ranked hundreds of book titles with gay subject matter on the grounds that they were too 'adult.'Books without sales rankings do not show up in Amazon's bestseller lists, no matter how many copies they have sold.
Author Mark R. Probst wrote to Amazon to ask why his young adult novel, The Filly, had lost its ranking.
He received this brief message from Amazon Member Services in reply:"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."
Writes Probst, "Yes, it is true. Amazon admits they are indeed stripping the sales ranking indicators for what they deem to be 'adult' material. Of course they are being hypocritical because there is a multitude of 'adult' literature out there that is still being ranked – Harold Robbins, Jackie Collins, come on! They are using categories THEY set up (gay and lesbian) to now target these books as somehow offensive."
On Sunday evening, Amazon attempted to defend itself against the Web outrage by telling Publisher's Weekly that a "glitch" was responsible for the de-rankings. No reason was given why Amazon earlier told Probst and other authors that their books were too "adult" to be ranked.
The "glitch" was still affecting a number of book rankings on Monday morning.
The Los Angeles Times checked into which books with gay subject matter had been de-ranked. They include: Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs, Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 by Michel Foucault, Little Birds: Erotica by Anais Nin and the 1992 National Book Award winner, Becoming a Man, by Paul Monette.
Interestingly, Amazon's reported adult content policy does not extend to searches on sex toys.
