Amazon goes Bowdler: If it ain’t pabulum, they don’t like it
By Paul Biba
This item from LISNews is absolutely astonishing. I can’t think of anything more to say: res ipsa loquitur.
Writers of gay romance noticed, over the past few days, that books in the “Gay Romance” category have disappeared from the best-seller list in that category. Publisher and author Mark Probst, whose book, “The Filly” is a gay young-adult book without explicit content, queried Amazon. This is what they said to him:
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.
Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.
Best regards,
Ashlyn D
Member Services
Amazon.com AdvantageThe Livejournal community is tracking this and accumulating data, some of which follows.
At present, amazon.de ist unaffected, and people from Germany who access .co.uk and .com seem to be unaffected, too.
Related: Mark Probst’s Web page and his comments on Amazon’s censorship. Also see list of books with sales ranks removed.
Recommended by 
April 12th, 2009 at 9:53 pm
If this is true, and it appears to be, it really is remarkable. I can’t imagine what the folks at Amazon are thinking. Maybe they’re being pressured by anti-gay wingnuts or something. Which would only make it worse if it were the case - such craven pandering … but I’d (still) like to think better of Amazon than this. They sure to seem to be making it harder and harder though.
I’ll repeat something from below:
A commenter at Boing Boing made a good point - the DRM issue is important for obvious reasons, not the least of which is the control of information they thus gain; and the more control Amazon gains, the more their apparent discrimination against gay/lesbian-themed books matters.
April 13th, 2009 at 10:13 am
I was curious whether they might be doing this for other books that might be considered “controversial,” but I couldn’t figure out what “sales rank” was or how to tell if a book had it or not…
April 13th, 2009 at 10:43 am
I think someone gamed the system and that could be very hard to fix. More critically I think this is a sign of major scalability issues for Amazon’s business model as I wrote here - http://www.di2.nu/200904/13a.htm - earlier today.