Monday, April 13, 2009

What the hell Amazon?

I was going to post a lovely painting I did somehow yesterday of some cherry blossoms but after finding out about this latest back handed switcheroo pulled by amazon I changed my mind.

If you haven't heard about it or caught it on twitter apparently amazon has basically pulled any and all LGBT books sales ranking as well as from certain searches and lists. They claim its because they want to hide anything with adult material. Just for an example of how much of a lie that is they've removed Stephen Fry and Ellen DeGeneres autobiographies but kept up Ron Jeremie's. So lesbian and gay comedians bad but a porn star just fine?

It's so fucking insane if you search for "Homosexuality" there the first thing that pops up is this drivel "A Parent's Guide To Preventing Homosexuality".

For more information check out Jezebel that has a long list of books stripped of sales ranks and those that had them left.

I was trying to talk my husband into getting an Amazon account but after this god awful attempt at censoring by claiming it's all a glitch I'm thinking about abandoning ship and going to Barnes and Noble.

Bravo Amazon, you may have just found a great way to keep brick and mortar bookstores in the red.

4 comments:

Julie @ Bunsen Burner Bakery said...

Yeah, it's really pissing me off, too. They say it's to prevent children from making inappropriate searches, but then why if you search for "pirates" is the first thing that comes up an R rated take on an X-rated movie? Shouldn't that also be taken down if you're preventing children from making inappropriate searches?

I would MUCH rather my (future) children read a biography on Ellen DeGeneres than Ron Jeremy, thank you very much.

Linda said...

And now they are claiming it was a glitch. No we didn't mean to do it. It sounds little too much like censorship to me.

Ellen Mint said...

I don't buy that it was a glitch either. Otherwise why were all those other books not taken off as well?

It sounds like someone's covering their ass now.

valerie said...

Wow. I am... amazed by Amazon. And not in a good way either.

Amazon now sucks in my mind. Thanks for the heads up. I never would have noticed, mostly because I rarely ever shop at Amazon. Brett does a lot of shopping there though, so I'll have to tell him about this.

P.S. Ron Jeremy is a freaky freaky nasty and disturbing dude. How is that even remotely "better" and "more suitable" for kids to search for than homosexuality?? Seriously. His autobiography is probably all about how he learned he can do auto fellatio!