If they want to remove erotica from the list, they should (a) say so and (b) have some sane definition of erotica. “Should gay people be allowed to serve in the army?” is not erotica.

If someone is actually searching for books by a particular author, they should be able to find them even if you’re worried that J. Random Parent would be upset about their children finding those books at random.

Amazon does exactly that. They do have an overall top 100 but they have Top 100 lists for a couple dozen other categories – one of which is history.

If you select the “Health, Mind & Body” category they have a sub-category there for “Sex” and a category for “Sex Instruction”.

While they may not incorporate these “risque” titles in their overall Top 100 the books listed in the “Sex Instruction” category when clicked to the actual book page do show the overall sale rank (as of the moment of this post “Tickle his Pickle is ranked 2013 in books (is that overall or just for this specific category?).

I can’t blame amazon for keeping these sorts of titles out of their easy to find Top 100 list. Given how worked up some Americans get over anything dealing with the topic it’s probably just not worth the hassles they would likely have to put up with.

I guess this is a case of damned if they do and damned if they don’t eh?

It does not appear to be just Amazon USA though. Amazon France has separate categories also in their “Meilleures ventes Livres”. There you’ll find a “Érotisme” section which has a lot more separate categories than the USA site.

Both sites do sell Hentai but only the French site seems to have a “Top 100″ Hentai seller list.

I don’t see how this constitues any sort of censorhsip on amazon’s part. They are probably just trying to take a simple step to try and behave as many communities offline expect – in my community adult mags have to be (at least theoretically) kept from view and reach of minors.

That means that when Amazon plays down a title, the ramifications are greater than if Joe Doe’s Bookstore did. This is, in an Amazon context, a form of censorship.

Amazon is entitled to censor, weed, whatever you call it, but remember: this is one more blow against consumer choice. The best solution would be to let consumers choose what they wanted displayed on the lists. The default display could be a compromise. Seems to work for Google searching. So why not Amazon?

Meanwhile thanks to Jane for answering your question.

Usual warning: Blog posts by nature raise questions but generally are not the same as articles researched at length. Pay me and I’ll spend a few days on this. The true value of a blog comes from a mix of the posts and the comments, and both you and Jane added to it.

Thanks,
David

This isn’t to say that the post isn’t full of conjecture on Amazon’s part, but there are other etailers who aren’t hiding erotic books.

I don’t know, I’d like to just see the real top 100 rather than have it filtered.

Same thing with the NYT. My understanding, for example, is that sales from Christian bookstores are excluded from the NYT bestseller list.