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Amazon Removes Sales Listings For Gay Books
In: web resources
13 Apr 2009Amazon.com has come under fire for removing the "Sales Rank" data for books with gay and lesbian themes.
Author Mark R. Probst wrote about the Amazon policy change on his blog Sunday.
"On Amazon.com two days ago, mysteriously, the sales rankings disappeared from two newly-released high profile gay romance books: ‘Transgressions’ by Erastes and ‘False Colors’ by Alex Beecroft. Everybody was perplexed. Was it a glitch of some sort?"
Mark R. Probst
"The very next day HUNDREDS of gay and lesbian books simultaneously lost their sales rankings, including my book ‘The Filly.’ There was buzz, What’s going on? Does Amazon have some sort of campaign to suppress the visibility of gay books?"
Probst posted a response he received from an Amazon.com Advantage member services representative about the removal of the sales rankings.
"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."
The explanation from the Amazon customer service representative contradicts what a spokesperson later said about the removal of the sales rankings.
Amazon’s spokesperson blamed the sales ranking removals on a "glitch."
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2 Responses to Amazon Removes Sales Listings For Gay Books
campbelp2002
February 14th, 2010 at 1:13 am
Neither of your pictures appear to be false color views. Exhibit B shows a mixture of emission and reflection nebulosity in the Milky Way. Exhibit A shows a star field with distant galaxies, and is naturally less colorful. In both cases the color balance attempts a reasonably "natural" appearance. what constitutes natural color in an astrophoto is more subject to interpretation than a terrestrial scene because these photos bring out colors too faint to be seen by the human eye. But while the colors in exhibit B are more saturated than what you could see, they are natural insofar as they correspond to the colors the camera detected.
False color photos most often involve images taken in wavelengths outside human vision. Though they lack naturalistic beauty, they can show you the otherwise invisible. I find that to be pretty inspiring also, though in a more intellectual way.
fario
December 9th, 2010 at 6:36 pm
Dynamic journalist author signs his name on emails followed by an exclamation mark! Just to prove how dynamic he is! Not a drama queen, no!