Sign the petition protesting Amazon's new discriminatory policy:

[beac]

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/in-protest-at-amazons-new-adult-policy

The issue, in a nutshell, is that Amazon has marked LGBT books as "adult" content and is excluding them from searches and removing their rankings, while leaving books about Playboy centerfolds and other no-question-about-it "adult" books alone.

From the petition:

We find it hypocritical that Amazon continues to sell adult books but thinks that removing the sales rating to (keep them out of the public eye) will achieve this.

We would like to hear the rationalization for allowing sales ratings for explicit books with a heterosexual focus such as:

--Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds by Chronicle Books (pictures of over 600 naked women)
--Rosemary Rogers' Sweet Savage Love" (explicit heterosexual romance);
--Kathleen Woodiwiss' The Wolf and the Dove (explicit heterosexual romance);
--Bertrice Smal's Skye o'Malley which are all explicit heterosexual romances
--and Alan Moore's Lost Girls (which is a very explicit sexual graphic novel)

Yet the following books, which have a gay or lesbian focus, have been classed as "adult books" and stripped of their sales ratings:

--Radclyffe Hill's classic novel about lesbians in Victorian times, The Well of Loneliness, and which contains not one sentence of sexual description;
--Mark R Probst's YA novel The Filly about a young man in the wild West discovering that he's gay (gay romance, no sex);
--Charlie Cochrane's Lessons in Love (gay romance with no sex);
--The Dictionary of Homophobia: A Global History of Gay & Lesbian Experience, edited by Louis-George Tin (non-fiction, history and social issues);
--and Homophobia: A History by Bryan Fone (non-fiction, focus on history and the forms prejudice against homosexuality has taken over the years).

Please tell us, Amazon, why the explicit books with a heterosexual focus are allowed to keep their sales ratings while the non-explicit romances, the histories and the biographies that deal with LGBTQ issues are not.

[beac]

1. BTW, Amazon claims this was a "glitch" in their software.

Yeah, a glitch that finds wicked, sinful Ellen Degeneres' biography and leaves sweet little Miss November alone.

:eyes:

[PetrusMonsFormicarum]

2. This just breaking

A hacker named Weev has claimed credit for the de-ranking of LGBT titles on Amazon. The link from PCWorld follows:

Hacker Claims Credit For Amazon's Gay-Themed Book 'Glitch'

[beac]

3. Interesting that Amazon is not claiming this was the reason.

"Amazon spokesperson Drew Herdener responded via e-mail shortly after this story's publication. He initially described the issue as "an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error." When asked specifically whether Amazon had any stance on the hacker's claims of involvement, he responded only by stating that it was "an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error by *Amazon*" (his emphasis)."


And when I called, they also gave me the "glitch" excuse.


I wonder if Amazon would rather be thought homophobic and lose customers than admit that they were hacked?? Strange.