unethical corporations? in MY late-capitalist society?!

[sebastienne]

Oh dear.. after being told about Amazon's crapness on Intellectual Property issues and considering buying from them anyway, it was only a matter of time before they'd come and hit me where I live.

Gay books = porn?

Queer is a dirty word?

That's right; Amazon have had a queer whitewash. If you're a questioning teen, you'll no longer find Young Adult books with queer themes on a basic search, because they've all been classified as "adult" by merit of their "gay and lesbian" tag. The word 'queer' will be stripped from any search you make.

This is fscking dystopian.

(Then again, I may have finally found something interesting to write about for my essay on "Information Organisation"...)

Comments

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Ick. Seriously? Oh, Amazon. I'm having trouble figuring out how to write to complain about this, though, because I can't quite enunciate the issue. Is it basically that they've added an "adult" tag to all books with queer themes, and Amazon's adult books by default don't appear in search listings?

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

The first link is to do with sales rankings and visibility - which I'll admit I don't 100% understand - while the second is to do with the fact that they strip the word 'queer' out of searches in the same way they would with 'to' or 'by'. Possibly the second is easier to complain about, as you can say, 'I want to search for queer theory texts' more easily than you can complain about 'all the queer books are suddenly much harder to find'?

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

But are they doing that? If I search just for "queer theory" in the basic search, I get this page (http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_ss_b?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=queer+theory&x=0&y=0), which looks all in order to me.

If I then search for a book that has "queer" in the title, like, say, "Fear of A Queer Planet", and search without quotes, I get this page (http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_ss_b?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=fear+of+a+queer+planet&x=0&y=0), which also seems all right.

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

Right. Now take that second search, change the dropdown to "all departments", and see what you get...

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Aha. Special.

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

(though the first one is okay. huh. interesting - it's being applied a bit oddly)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Well. I have emailed them a faux-confused screed about how I can't find my queer books. bah. Why is the world so fail.

[foreverdirt.livejournal.com]

Dear Amazon,

I'm really confused. Why are you so fail?

Lots of love,
A confused customer who is confused

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Dear Katy,

The world is fail and homophobic. Can I have a puppy?

your srsly,

me.

[foreverdirt.livejournal.com]

Am halfway through watching last night's Who. You can have a housefly, if you like?

[robot-mel.livejournal.com]

This doesn't seem to be true for amazon.co.uk
Which has lots of gay tags and things that come up in searches. But then I was also able to find lots of queer books from a simple search on amazon.com. Even a search for "gay teen fiction" worked. Most bizarre.

Am taking your advice and going to watch episode 2 of red dwarf after not having been very impressed with the first one.

[janetmweiss.livejournal.com]

*stares* I went to make a post about this in my own journal. I copied loneraven's search and, yup, strikethrough-queer. But I've never heard of "Fear of a Queer Planet" so I decided to do a search more of my friends list would recognize. Tried "Queer as Folk" in all departments, and everything looked fine. Queer as Folk still even has its rankings.

So...books are bad, but actually watching gay boys have mad sex (I assume. I never got around to watching the series) is fine??

Anyway, as far as amazon.ca is concerned, search seems to be fine, even for books, but I think rankings are gone.

[andustar.livejournal.com]

Moar stuff: http://community.livejournal.com/meta_writer/11369.html?style=mine

[soixantequatre.livejournal.com]

http://jezebel.com/5209088/why-is-amazon-removing-the-sales-rankings-from-gay-lesbian-books

queer by burroughs is still there though? they arn't being very consistent