sciarra

Since I'm not sleeping, I just thought I'd add to the clamor about Amazon stripping books that contain "adult content" of their Amazon Rank (which makes them hard to find and damages author sales among other things). It does seem to be very LGBT-aimed, although I don't get the algorithm that was used. Jeanette Winterson's The Passion escaped censure but Giovanni's Room and Brokeback Mountain did not. I looked up Vox, and it's still ranked but Lady Chatterly's Lover is not. Rather, one can find the Baldwin and Lawrence, but only in older editions. So, even if they were trying to hide them, the method used is faulty, to say the least. Lots of other people have written about this more eloquently than I, but I was bemused that Winterson escaped. I've seen it suggested that some of this has to do with tagging--and there is no "erotic" tagging associated with The Passion, only "lesbian" and "romance" as separate tags. G's R, however, has the tag "gay romance" (and now "amazonfail"!!!). This is also the number one tag over on twitter, to which I've finally succumbed as _thera_ (who keeps taking my name? I want it back now plz.) Finally, Heather Has Two Mommies doesn't meet any of these qualifications, though, so who knows.

Given the outcry over the weekend and Amazon's hasty backpedaling to now claim the rank stripping was a "glitch," I'm guessing there will be some resolution soon. I don't know how I feel about the company now, though. I'll be looking for a Canadian alternative.
ETA: thistleingrey has pointed me to jonquil's great post about the evolution of this "glitch."