Nonetheless, the news is thus: Amazon.com has pulled primarily LGBT books from their sales ranking system. That might sound pretty harmless, until you realize that this is one of the ways that many people find books on the site because the sales ranking affects the site's search results. Go ahead, do a search for “homosexuality” on Amazon.com: as of 9:15am CST today, the search results in almost nothing but books on how to “cure” or “fix” homosexuality.
Adding insult to injury, Amazon has sent all sorts of mixed messages, calling this “removing adult titles” from the sales ranking-- but many of the books removed were not sexual in nature (such as the non-fiction “Homophobia: A History”), while many sexual books (like Playboy or Alan Moore's graphic novel Lost Girls, which even features primarily lesbian action!) were left on.
A lot of people are writing about this right now, as you might imagine, but true to form Erica Friedman offers the level-headed best response:
“This is not a crisis, nor should we run screaming, but I think it is important enough that every reader, writer, publisher, editor and all champions of freedom of expression should take note. Amazon has changed its policy and has de-ranked books that it deems "adult" in nature. This includes anything they count as erotica and many non-adult LGBT books, as well.
I do not advocate being outraged. Outrage accomplishes nothing. I *do* advocate a polite, but firm letter campaign asking that Amazon allow sales to indicate sales rank and nothing else.”
Now, Amazon has come out and called this a “glitch” to Publishers Weekly, but an earlier interaction with a customer service representative referred to it as part of the company's new policy to protect its userbase from accidentally finding adult materials.
Now, again, the effect on Japanese-related materials has been pretty minimal-- even yaoi titles with more generic names like “Love Circumstances” and “The Devil's Secret” and “Meeting You” have come up in search without much difficulty for me, although Simon refers to reports that some yaoi have proven more difficult to find. But if it's not nipped in the bud, as so many authors and readers are now working to do, it could definitely move that direction.
Besides which, it's bad policy in general to let companies get away with “protecting” the public from homosexuality, if you ask me. What do you think?
Sources: Okazu, Icarus Publishing, Mark Probst, Lilith Saint Crow, Meta Writer
Just about everything mainstream nowadays is getting so effed up and overly "politically correct" everyone's forgetting the original reasons for such services existing in the first place... I know I should care, but I just can't find it in me to.
I am actually quite a bit bewildered by this as yaoi has it's own 'shop' and that 'shop' was fairly high up on the search tree.
If you go to 'books', then to 'comics and graphics novels', both 'manga' and 'yaoi' are listed directly under 'comics and graphic novels'. It always seemed to me that yaoi, at least, was fairly well promoted on the site. The 'yaoi' section is well organized and has it's own 'bestsellers - updated hourly' list.
Though, if the company has some new people running certain sections, they would have taken a bit too much initiative and made descisions contrary to the overall structure. It used to be the norm that gay romances were considered 'adult' even if they had no adult content. Early on, Amazon did not seem to rank things that way.
If I were a betting person, I'd put my money on mid-level manager who made policy descions he or she was not entitled to make. At least, I hope that's the case. I've always liked Amazon.
I had a feeling people were knee jerk reacting a little too quickly.
I'll go ahead and link both of my articles here:
AnimeNews Article
EcchiNews Article with affected Yaoi/BL/Yuri Titles