Amazon's Oppressive "Glitch"

Over the weekend, a firestorm of outrage erupted online over the new policy by Amazon.com to remove sales rankings of books that the site deemed “adult” …and reclassifying the definition to include all gay, lesbian or transgendered characters and/or themes of their book rankings. Interestingly, Amazon chose to leave the heterosexual erotica untouched, their sales rankings intact.

Who cares, right? It's just a ranking. Well, this is particularly development is important because book rankings show up in product searches, which diretly translates into sales. After the outrage began to take hold on social media sites like Twitter, Amazon.com issued a statement saying that the matter was caused by a “glitch” that removed the book rankings from all of the GLBT books and that the issue would be remedied immediately.

Immediately, huh? Readers may be interested to find that this practice was first noticed and reported back in February. Nobody acknowledged it at all until the general buying public started to catch wind of the practice (over Easter weekend, no less).

Amazon's response to this controversy:

A “glitch” on Amazon.com has caused the sales rank to be removed from gay- and/or lesbian-themed books by James Baldwin, Gore Vidal and others. “There was a glitch in our systems and it’s being fixed,” Amazon’s director of corporate communications, Patty Smith, said in an e-mail Sunday. As of Sunday night, books without rankings included Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room,” Vidal’s “The City and the Pillar” and Jeanette Winterson’s “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.” The removals prompted furious remarks on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere online. Craig Seymour, author of the gay memoir “All I Could Bare,” wrote on his blog Sunday that his sales rank was dropped in February, then restored nearly four weeks later, after he was told by Amazon that his book had been “classified as an Adult product.”

It's not very often that a glitch causes a barrage of selective censorship. Maybe God got involved. Maybe he felt a little stupid after wiping out Fargo last week, realizing just a bit too late that Pat Robertson was joking when he said in their weekly meeting on high that the gays, heathens and sinners from New Orleans migrated north to the Dakotas when the Holy Floods came a'washin' it all away. This could be God's way of... making... reading... inconvenient? For gays?

Yeah, that concept is about as absurd as thinking that an invisible, all-powerful spaceman rules over the entire universe and punishes people who love the wrong kind of people with hurricanes and floods.

What seems more likely is that the company's conservative administrators simply didn't think anyone with a loud enough voice would take notice - or issue - with the "glitch". Needless to say, Amazon owes its entire customer base, not just the gay & lesbian community, an apology. This type of unabashed censorship and prejudice will no longer be tolerated under the guise of "what's right and decent" in America. The hyper-conservative hand-wringers no longer run the Big Show, and the effects are radiating outward at a breathless pace - matched, of course, by the hysterical revolutionist attitudes on the rise among the dying GOP elite (Tea Party, anyone?).

The Dear Author blog has published some helpful information for those of you who wish to contact Amazon directly to voice your displeasure:

Amazon executive customer service email is: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and the customer service phone number is 1-800-201-7575.